I am NOT sitting in a room

Ultrasonic speakers turn image markers on walls into sound paintings, labyrinth shaped antenna as a source of sound, schematic tunnels on screens follow visitor motion diametrically.

In Jim Jarmusch’s film “Down by Law” there is a scene in a windowless prison cell where Bob, a character with a poor command of language, draws a window on the wall and asks his fellow comrades: “Excuse me, do you say in English, ‘I look at the window,’ or do you say in English, ‘I look out the window’?”

The project stems off of an interdisciplinary research field archeoacoustics which investigates the acoustic properties of prehistoric ritual sites. Their results indicate that many of those sites have specific resonant qualities, deliberately engineered or formed by nature, that amplify and augment the affective potential of the rituals performed. Performative acts held in those places were as tools to induce trance-like states on the participants. Trance can be considered as a state of mind in which our bodily senses, our instruments of perception, have been altered or completely switched off.

Nowadays, in western societies, we could say we are operating in a constant trance, induced by the overwhelming presence of technology. Our senses are laid out onto the technological plane and dissolved into information labyrinths while our bodies still occupy the physical spaces at hand.

The installation borrows the title from the iconic sound work by Alvin Lucier, but negates its focus on the room at hand, and augments its spatial dimensions by creating technological openings, windows between physical and virtual realities which sonify and bridge solid walls to emphemeral human-made magnetic fields.