Bill Fontana shared his work and artistic process of the past 30 years. Fontana played short videos, sound recordings and showed photos of his work that has been exhibited throughout the world. The event culminated in a surround sound performance of two spectacular pieces: Kirribilli Wharf (1976), a pioneering 8 channel sound sculpture realized in 1976 for the Australian Broadcasting Commission and last presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1985 and Speeds of Time (2004 and 2008) which had been a live sound sculpture with Big Ben (London).

Known internationally for his pioneering experiments in sound art, San Francisco artist Bill Fontana has worked for the past 30 years creating installations that use sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. His sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a living source of musical information. He views music, in the sense of coherent sound patterns, as a process that is going on constantly.

His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Post Museum in Frankfurt, the Art History and Natural History Museums in Vienna, both Tate Modern and Tate Britain in London, the 48th Venice Biennale, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Art Gallery of NSE in Sydney and the new Kolumba Museum in Cologne. He has done major radio sound art projects for the BBC, the European Broadcast Union, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, West German Radio (WDR), Swedish Radio, Radio France and the Austrian State Radio.

"I began my artistic career as a composer. What really began to interest me was not so much the music that I could write, but the state of mind I would experience when I felt musical enough to compose. In those moments, when I became musical, all the sounds around me also became musical.
— Bill Fontana

"Fontana's sound environments renew our awareness of the places we inhabit and the powerful role sound plays in both our sense of self and memory. Fontana's work is predicated on a sophisticated investigation into how we perceive sounds in the world. He has created a series of compelling projects that subtly treat the interplay between the origins of sounds and the contexts in which we perceive them, causing the viewer to become conscious of himself and his senses as he hears and perceives anew the world he inhabits"
— John Hanhardt, Guggenheim Museum