A Spacetime Mapping Experiment
Introduction
If a lily’s petals fall in a room and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?
I suppose I could engage with this paraphrased question, this Berkeleyan notion, as a starting point for this fourth and last chapter of the current investigation into perception, which is dedicated especially to the temporality of sound and its emplacement. The question, in the age of mechanical reproduction and the proliferation of recording devices, feels passé, is suffused with an almost nostalgic tint of untamed sensuousness, as if we become lost in a reverie of a distant past, or Proustian voyage.
The current practice with its experimental outcome attempts once more to respond to the following research questions, through first-hand experience of time/space amplification:
1. How can the perception of time be extended, shortened, textured, paused or eventually denied?
2. What is the relationship between the phenomenology of time and the spectrum of human states closely related to time perception, such as euphoria or boredom?
3. How is time experienced by the senses and articulated in artistic practices that investigate a specific species of time, such as physical, psychological, cyclical (such as works from choreographer Hijikata, film director Tarkovsky, and writer Borges)?
The result of this experiment in soundography (sic), mapping space through sound, is an interactive Installation. The work consists of a combination of mediums designed to provoke temporality of the senses: more than 70 foam boards from A6 to A1 size, with printed images of charts, scores, maps, drawings, photographs, digital processed images, and text; four white wooden boxes of different dimensions laid on the floor, enclosing several objects: a clock, a glass vase with a bouquet of lily flowers, a book, a drip coffee machine, a microphone immersed in a jar containing a little pond of styrofoam spheres and a hydrophone immersed in a second jar, full of water; an isolated object, a worn shoe placed on an A1 board; a red cotton thread connecting many boards and objects, tracing trajectories and dividing the space; four loudspeakers capturing and processing live input of the microphone and the hydrophone, while simultaneously playing a 50-minute audio field recording of my walk from home to the studio, repeated over and over. Indeed, the soundographic experiment set-up in the studio begins with and is conceived, composed, and designed around that daily walk routine.
Figure 1 – Satellite map of the path (from home to the venue) –