Passage
by Jordan Borges


 
 

Changing a space with audio was a real challenge for me because I had never worked with audio without video and the whole idea of audio being its own distinct media was foreign to me. After brainstorming ideas of what kind of change I wanted to create in the room, it was easier to conceptualize what kind of materials and structures I wanted within my work. I was really intrigued by the idea of a link between two different spaces, a passage that could connect two very different points. A doorway conceptually just made sense. We use doors in our everyday lives, and we always know generally what’s on the other side of the doorway, whether that be another room or exit to the outside world. But what if we couldn’t identify what was on the other side of the door? And all we had to attempt to identify with was an unrecognizable stream of audio.
Once the concept was there I constructed the doorway by constructing a temporary door frame around an available door. Continuing with the concept of the door leading to another space, possibly not of this world, I placed the door on the floor. Not only was the doorway leading to somewhere unknown, but now was in a position that was unfamiliar to those who would come across it. A simple lighting system was utilized to give the doorway an unsettling ambient glow, which when reflected off blue tape gave off a blue stream of light. The light itself added to the work in a very appropriate manner as it was as if there was a force trying to break its way into our world.
Most of the audio clips that I collected would be recognizable in their original forms, things like fans, heaters, a speaker humming. The interesting clip comes from an audio recorder, protected in a Ziploc bag, being dumped into a fish tank and left to record for approximately a minute. Submerged underwater is almost like an otherworldly experience in itself, as we are not accustom to hearing audio in that manner, and so it incorporated well into my overall concept. The end result was this really ambiguous, eerie sort of sound that to me encompassed everything I thought the audio should allude to about the space beyond the door.


 

 

<click to play/pause audio, best listened to via headphones

Installation Location: Rm 111 VAC Building
materials:
Wooden Door, Frame (1X6 planks), Lights, Speakers and Audio Source.

link to more sonic interventions

VAS2250-002 >>UWO2013