Courtesy of Alice Bourget
Peanut butter and jelly, ice cream and cake. Things that have stood the test of time, and taste. But light and sound—those have been around much longer than the others, and their impact is elemental. At Sensorio in Paso Robles, you can feel that impact, sometimes in subtle tugging at your eyes and ears, sometimes in dazzling sweeps of color and feeling. Sensorio is Fourth of July with a graduate degree.
Where it is, is the rolling hills of Paso Robles, California. What it’s made of is 3 miles of conduit, 250,000 parts, and mesmerizing servings of fiber-optic light, its newest installation a project that took over four years. What it feels like, on these sprawling but intimate grounds, is an enveloping sense of harmony and invitation. Atmosphere? Sensorio is atmosphere wrapped in diamonds.
And that atmosphere has some new real estate: FOSO (Fiber Optic Symphonic Orchestra) has been unveiled, and it’s a jewel. Designed by light magician Bruce Munro as his fifth Sensorio installation, it hosts “Tessellation,” an original orchestral score by Emmy-winner Nainita Desai. “Beautiful” is too shabby an adjective to use.
Can the profound also be playful? With FOSO, yes. As Munro relates, “FOSO was something that I dreamt of doing as a child. This idea of having the immersive experience of an orchestra, but slightly breaking the mold and being allowed to literally walk around the musicians as they’re playing. With the irreverent idea to turn something like a Hills Hoist, a washing line, into a beautiful sculptural object.”
FOSO – Courtesy of Alice Bourget
Desai, the mathematician turned composer says, “I love the beauty of numbers. And numbers are found everywhere around us, in nature as well. This was the incredible opportunity to dig deep for me and bring in all my influences in this beautiful intersection between music and nature and science and numbers. And Sensorio is the perfect landscape to bring all these different disciplines together.”
Partnered with my sweetheart Alice, our evening of drenching in light and sound began with a blanketing sunset highlighting the stately heritage oaks of Sensorio, followed by a luminous moonrise—talk about orchestration! Walking down from the upper terrace into the flowing Field of Light installation is almost hallucinatory, with its enveloping feeling—the glow of the rolling mass of illumined bulbs on their optic stalks is transportive. We moved through the many varied and expressive installations on the walkable paths, heading to FOSO through the vocal “oohs!” and “wows” of our fellow space travelers.
The sensual magnet drew us to FOSO as the orchestral sounds touched us upon entrance. The 32 towers are considerably more majestic than Munro’s demurring of them being clotheslines. If clotheslines, these are royal ones, that dance with the music. “That was the big challenge here, to create something that was visually beautiful and work in conjunction with the music,” says Desai. “We associate colors with emotion. Every element of the music, every instrument of the music, the violins, the wood winds, the strings, the brass, the percussion, all those elements are synchronized in time to the music.”
Munro chimes in: “Because sculpture is a three-dimensional process, you have to be aware of the environment,” he says. “Rather like the Impressionists when they used to create these color wobbles, this effect is like shimmer, by putting complementaries together. FOSO really is a synesthesia, which is the mixing of the senses—this idea that you could see color in sound, or when you heard a sound, there was an associated color or visual form.”
The FOSO forms seem to shift and tease with their reflective shades and tones, guided and nudged by the symphonic sound. “This work is the culmination of my entire artistic influences, and telling stories through light and emotion and color,” says Desai. “My intention here is to take the listener on an exhilarating, emotional rollercoaster of a journey through different musical pieces for them to feel a myriad of emotions, to take you through tensions and release them, building tension to soft releases of emotion.”
FOSO – Courtesy of Alice Bourget
Indeed, we sensed in visitors’ gestures and pauses those emotional waves. “These installations that you see at Sensorio are various sculptural interpretations of experiences that I’ve had in different parts of my life, different times of my life, and different parts of the world,” says Munro. “I was trying to interpret an emotional response to a landscape in light.”
Desai’s orchestral piece was recorded at the Vienna Syncron stage, performed by globally renowned musicians. “When you hear an orchestra breathe, literally breathing in a very organic way, playing your music, that is that magic of performance, hopefully one that translates to the audience,” says Desai. “And the audience will pick up the ebb and flow of this emotional connection that is being transported to them.”
Of course, Munro and Desai’s work is the nucleus of FOSO’s expression, but both artists were quick to say how the work is the labor of many, many hands at Sensorio. There’s a chain of countless workers in the connections between people (and the physical light connections and construction). As Munro says with a smile, “We’ve done the fluff, they’ve done the work.”
“There is a new spirit that you get from working with other people that breathes into the work,” says Munro. “We are intrinsically connected to each other, and the same goes for every single thing we do in our life. Collaboration is the most wonderful thing. And I believe you get a much more interesting piece at the end of the day,” he says.
Dimensions – Courtesy of Alice Bourget
That thought is echoed by his main collaborator: “Somebody will surprise you and go, ‘What did you think of this?’ And other people will respond to you and interpret your work in their way,” says Desai. “That will then feed in to what I’m doing. The heart of everything is collaboration.”
The persuasion of that heart is in full force at FOSO, and Sensorio in general. All of the installations open up your thinking, and put nourishing white (and colored) space in your feelings. Here, you get the long exhale of relaxation and—without contradiction—stimulation.
Towers – Courtesy of Alice Bourget
Sensorio is hitting an opposite-field triple to clear the bases at your first Little League game, it’s seeing your daughter’s first smile, it’s the spring scent of the lilac in your yard. Yes, I know that sounds like over-the-top blather. But as Nainita Desai says, “This is my small attempt of trying to bring out beauty from chaos to find our place in the world and who we are.” As Bruce Munro says, “Looking with your ears, looking with your eyes, looking with all your senses—it’s amazing then how rich the world around you becomes. We sometimes need to remind ourselves that we do live in an extraordinary, beautiful world.”
Bruce Munro & Nainita Desai – Courtesy of Alice Bourget
Here, the music swells, retreats, teases, lulls. The lights dance, wink, glow, burst.
Here at Sensorio, let there be light. And sound. Going back to story start, that stuff about great combinations? I could taste FOSO: It tasted just like ice cream and cake.
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