Stephen Vitiello

When Dia commissioned Vitiello to participate in its series of artists' projects for the web, he looked to the internet as a source and found himself thinking about non-musical sound archives. He soon zeroed in on physical, mostly natural sounds, which he then organized in accordance with the four elements: earth, air, wind, and fire. The resulting work serves as an interactive guide to these sometimes hard-to-find archives. Each site is represented by an audio sample that visitors can turn on or off by clicking as they draw on up to seventeen simultaneous tracks to devise a mix that might include a fruit fly courtship, an underwater volcano, poison frogs, and extracts from the fiery sounds of the Saturn 5 lift-off.

In addition, Vitiello created four new sound pieces generated in part from his collection of found web-based sounds. These compositions can be heard by clicking on icons taken from a Western representation of a Tibetan Stupa.¹ In this cosmology, the elements are ordered from the bottom as Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, with Ether as the fifth element. When a fifth element was included by ancient and medieval civilizations, it was usually described as space and often had a metaphysical dimension. In the nineteenth century, it was widely accepted in physics that a "luminiferous ether" existed-a theoretical, transparent, weightless, undetectable, and universal substance believed to act as the medium for transmission of electromagnetic waves. While this idea was ultimately disproved by Einstein's theory of relativity, it gave rise to the name "Ethernet," the standard for data transmission used by most networks, including the Internet. Bob Metcalfe, its accredited founder, explained "Ethernet was named, on May 22, 1973, for the luminiferous ether...an omnipresent passive medium of the propagation of electromagnetic waves, in our case, Internet packets.²"

Vitiello named his project after the ancient Western notion of four elements. The term Tetrasomia refers to the Doctrine of Four Elements written by Empedocles, the fifth-century BC philosopher, who first postulated that all matter is comprised of four "roots," or basic elements. A contemporary notion of "the fifth element" is also present in Tetrasomia: its content and context exist in the ether(net).