Created through collaboration between Sebastien Leoon Agneesens, New York-based French musician and artist, and Situ Fabrication, the sculpture was produced as an exhibition piece for B Brian Atwood’s New York showroom. Named after a medieval mythological poisonous snake, the Leontophone is a sound sculpture aiming to poetically hypnotize its audience through visual and sonic stimuli.

Born from the encounter of op art and glam rock, the 32-foot long piece is composed of 174 mirrored aluminum keys reflecting distorted images of reality. The Leontophone plays a looped original melody created on a vibraphone filtered with electric guitar pedals.

The sculpture consists of 174 hexagonal, polished aluminum tiles which form a 30 ft. long serpent-like figure. To fix each individual tile in a precise location and angle, Situ Fabrication designed a plywood armature that supported threaded rods with swivel fittings.  The positions and lengths of the threaded rod as well as the angle of the swivels were all coordinated so that the complex, tessellated form could rise from a simplified plywood armature.

Grasshopper was utilized to generate a 3D model and manage all of the CNC fabrication data.  The plywood armature and 174 aluminum tiles were numbered and nested onto cutsheets and a schedule of corresponding rod lengths was produced.  The entire project took three weeks from start to finish.

Through its three-dimensional geometric tessellation and psychedelic sonic landscape, Seb Leon intends to create hypnotic sculptures. One could get lost in the repetition of simple shapes, in the deformed reflections of the angled keys, or in the loops of acoustic music subtly altered by both electronic pedals and software.

Leave a Reply