Ever since I came across Bernhard Leitner's book, Sound Space, which documents his lifelong work with architecture, sound and space, I have been fascinated with possibilities for sound. In the past several years, I've completed a few sound works, mainly: Sound Interventions (2002) while I was a student at the MIT Interrogative Design Workshop (IDW) which was essentially a sound recorder/speaker embedded in a newspaper vending machine to provide the "alternative headline"; The Year of the Rat (2003), a large scale site-specific installation; and most recently Birdsnest Heart (2006), in collaboration with Sopheap Pich, in Cambodia.

I am particularly interested when visual artists work with sound. I'm not talking about times when artists work with musicians or composers when they need sound for video work. I'm talking about working with sound as a raw material. It's refreshing and in fact, downright frightening letting go of the primacy of the visual. It's also a democratic act, giving the other senses experience. It's like parachute jumping, I hope it works.

A met an architecture student at MIT several years back, Junko Nakagawa, who was doing some interesting work on architecture and sound for her thesis. One of my favorite sound artists is Sachiko M, who does amazing work with sine wave manipulation.

Every night I was painting for my exhibition in Phnom Penh, a bat would fly throughout my house, pinging its sonar off my walls and my paintings. Maybe it was a sign. I'm a looking forward to returning to sound.