part of: Sounds like a book 2018
presented at: Galeria Posibilă, Bucharest, 2018
team members: Teodora Ungureanu, Maria Mandea
How do we experience silence?
Sound is a human experience, resulting from signals received by sense organs and sent to the brain. We can perceive them as either pleasant or annoying. But then how can we define silence? Is it the absence of sound? Or rather a diminished perception of certain sounds that disturb us. Sounds that we refer to as noise.
We wanted to define silence by trying to produce it.
We chose a process. We chose a context. We analyzed them in our book.
Sound is a human experience, resulting from signals received by sense organs and sent to the brain. We can perceive them as either pleasant or annoying. But then how can we define silence? Is it the absence of sound? Or rather a diminished perception of certain sounds that disturb us. Sounds that we refer to as noise.
We wanted to define silence by trying to produce it.
We chose a process. We chose a context. We analyzed them in our book.
The process: photography.
Photography selects elements from reality and leaves others out. In this case, it excludes sound. Photography is a silent medium and we chose it precisely for that.
Photography selects elements from reality and leaves others out. In this case, it excludes sound. Photography is a silent medium and we chose it precisely for that.
The context: a football game.
A football match is a loud event: you have a large group of people cheering or booing two teams. And this is where we searched for silence.
The book: Still game.
We had a silent image from a loud context. We took pieces from this image: sound artefacts, and we reconstructed them as a visual game.
The result is a new set of relationships between sounds. It’s a new, created noise that you can only imagine but not hear. Therefore, a silent noise.
The result is a new set of relationships between sounds. It’s a new, created noise that you can only imagine but not hear. Therefore, a silent noise.
A book about a game.
As part of the 2 weeks workshop Sounds like a Book, held at the Muzeul Național al Hărții și Cărților Vechi we we're asked to create a book on a concept that relates to sound. We decided to work with silence in one of the loudest of contexts. I went to a local football match and took pictures of the crowd, trying to capture the sound along with the images. We chose one.
But an images is always silent.
So we started to look inside the image and explore parts of it, parts that reminded us of sounds produced when the image was taken. On those small parts of images we overlapped visual schemes to show where the sound was travelling (on transparent paper).