https://vimeo.com/55279047
Ignore the visuals, this is the original recording, which has such a beautiful sonic quality.
If you have a chance today, listen to the whole piece and just write your response. It can be
50-100 words.
I am sitting in a room (1969) is one of composer Alvin Lucier's best known sound art works.
The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.[1]
Lucier was originally inspired to create I am sitting in a room after a colleague mentioned attending a lecture at MIT in which Amar Bose described how he tested characteristics of the loudspeakers he was developing by feeding back audio into them that they had produced in the first place and then was picked up via microphones.[2]
The structural film: When the camera is fixed, we as viewers are in a journey within the limit of the tripod, a motion, left to right, right to left, or up and down, in ” All My Life “ case , where the camera is moving from left to right, a fence revealing the border of a garden, then the open sky with a wire crossing the screen moving downwards it seems, while the camera is moving up. it is mainly technical, a repetition of a scene, fixed from a certain point, looking at the world, from one angle, from the exact same point of view, exploring a new a visual event of an electrified space. a construction of a film based on simplicity, presenting the meaning through codes through out the film, forming a meaning to communicate through the imagery, such as letters, numbers etc..
ReplyDeleteThe viewers here have a big part in the existence of the film, by engaging mentally in its content through analyzing every frame, correcting what is being projected in front of them.
ReplyDeleteI am listening to this again after awhile and after having spent the day reading Foucault’s essay on the author and from an intellectual perspective this is what the piece makes me thing about. How the narration, acknowledging the spectator (listener), and the technology (resonant frequencies, and perhaps even the voice with its imperfections) opens the door up for multiple authors and the awareness that listening to the piece is also writing the piece. I also love the scratchiness.
ReplyDeleteThe language of video art that is discussed here is our own reflection, but yet separate from our real being in a psychological sense, and by using the physical mechanism of a medium containing the meaning of narcissism, in the reflection of our own mirror, a question pointed at us the viewers, what does it mean that the video is a medium, in which we live the psychological state of the repetitive self, that is constantly provoking narcissism to create the psychological state, and what effect does it bring on our moment, and the genre that it becomes, in the shadows of the psychological view of the video. something like throwing things, or words away, and continuously keep echoing back at us, as if the present and the past are merging together to create a new genre of a medium. In Boomerang clip, the reflection in the auditory mirror is something our ears sense, as we live in its surreal state, and surrender to the language that is used to connect this exact moment with the past, surrounded by own self of words, projected in front of us, using the human body as its tool to deliver the content over short period of time.
The fascination in the mirror, the camera, or the monitor combined together create the reflection, and illusion of erasing the space between the subject and the object.