Imagine a familiar alley. You’ve unconsciously wandered between the houses, perhaps your eyes are fixed on a mobile screen, or your gaze is turned inward. Muscle memory has guided your steps, and only when the street narrows and the houses draw closer together do you notice your own mechanical movement. You look back toward the sensory world, and for a brief moment, the sight that meets you is completely foreign. At first, all you see is light refracted by water particles. The rays scatter and are absorbed by matter, becoming color, material, volume, space, textures, concrete, metal and vegetation. A picture with astonishing detail is created on your retina, but it has not yet reached the memory center where it will be examined, sorted and archived. For a brief second, the place is autonomous in relation to your perception: you see, but what you see has no meaning. The image travels from the eye to the brain at a furious pace, and soon you are inundated with stored memories, through a vast index containing life experiences with synonyms and algorithms intertwined. You are now facing another place, saturated with meaning. This does not happen solely inside you, the alley is also transformed. At this moment, the various components of the place manifest in cross-sections: light particles, soundwaves, color and space emerge at once; stone, wood, gables, drainpipes, and cobble, all fall into place like a well-rehearsed ensemble. Then consciousness, with self-awareness, memory, and relationships come crashing down. The impact is so compelling that everything else fades in comparison.
In my practice I utilize the inherent ambiguity of sound to explore different behaviors and identities of bodies and their surroundings, which are often obscured by predominant representation. The Accent of Coming Steps is a multi-channel sound piece, depicting a train station through the sonic experience of an imagined passenger who is wavering between sleep and wakefulness.
