Tetrasomia by Stephen Vitiello

Tetrasomia by Stephen Vitiello (2001)

When you first go to the Tetrasomia website it looks like the first picture above. After you move your cursor around on the page, you will notice that you can click on something. When you click on the page in certain places, pictures show up and different sounds are played. The sounds will continue to play all at once and if you click on everything that you can on the screen, the screen will look like the second picture above. When you click on the little circle, square, triangle, and smile, the pictures go away. I enjoyed this website and found all of the sounds very stimulating because it was fun finding out what I would discover next. I think that Tetrasomia has its place in net.art history because it shows the use of random sounds and pictures that make for an interesting website that is more of an online installation than a typical website used to gather information or shop.

For years Stephen Vitiello has focused on sounds that might be called ambient, environmental or incidental. His work has combined field recordings with digital processing to create slowly evolving, sonically-rich soundscapes. 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).