A Line ~ A Circle
24.11.2022
Installation of work in progress
Openhaus November, ZK/U, Berlin
Aluminium sheets and pipes, plaster, postcard of the painting Vädersolstavlan, scores printed on A4-paper with aluminium details
Time goes in cycles as well as in a line. Or maybe it’s like peeling the skin of a potato. To explain time passing with a model can be different to how it feels - does one minute feel like 60 seconds? Presented at the OPENHAUS is the research of a graphic score for an ensemble, that later will be the foundation of a sound installation. A research made with a sound recorder and in the company of writings by Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin and composer Pauline Oliveros, on how sound can potentially evoke other imaginations of past, present and future beyond the singularity of sight.
On her 21st birthday, the composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros was gifted a tape recorder. When listening with her new electric ear, she noticed how the microphone was picking up sound from outside her window that she had not heard when the recording was in progress. Nothing new, but for her, unheard of. Like Oliveros, I put my recorder by the window, not where I live but in the studio that will be my home for two months.
On my computer, I normalize the recording so the quiet is amplified with the background noise. With an EQ-filter I separate the different frequencies to hear what is there. Birds are singing. Maybe it’s the same birds that wake me up in the morning. Car after car pass by. Then a loud truck. Children laughing from a school nearby. My concentrated listening is interrupted by the sound of a train from afar. A freight train? A commuter train? It’s the S-bahn. Freight trains are louder, maybe because of their heavier load and slower movement.
The railway and the harbor beside it, make up a soundtrack. The soundscape of the industrial age. In the noise that travel 1km to my ears, I hear promises and hopes of lost futures. Loud machines can convey a sense of power, but their constant presence make my eardrums sore. I hear echos of time, more specifically the standardized universal time implemented by the railroad. I repeat to myself: TIME. TIME. TIME. TYME. THYME. THYM. THAJM. TAMM. Until I just make a sound.
Photo credit: Elisa Georgi