10-channel sound, 2-channel video, movement for 14 movers
April 15 – 17, 2016
Becton Center, Yale University
New Haven, CT
Movers: Alina Aksiyote, Bernardo Bárzana, Edward Columbia, Cyrus Duff, Alexander Dubovoy, Jen Frantz, Ceri Godinez, Mary Chandler Gwin, Sienna Sewon Jun, Leyla Levi, Cezar Mocan, Uri Rosenshine, Holly Taylor, and Liza Zhvania
PROGRAM NOTE
Please move around the room. Feel free to weave through and with the movers. Walk in the spaces between people, towards something tangible or imagined. Listen to the polyphony of feet.
Small Worlds is a sound installation with video and movement which examines crowds and the sociological doors they open — among them the tension between multiplicity and unity, the pressures towards and against individuation, intimacy, the fear of being touched, and the particular kind of 'collective effervescence’ generated by the aggregation of human bodies.
The piece is a portrait of social density and a search for the individual microhistories threading their way through the discord of mouths and feet.
I’ve been making field recordings in subway cars in New York and elsewhere intermittently over the last few years. I’ve become obsessed with how things sound or behave in aggregate. In the subway, confronted with a dense linguistic morass, your ear catches little limbs of speech, severed from streams of conversation, from meaningful contexts. Little crystals of group-speech link together to form larger kaleidoscopic aggregates. There is always a lower stratum of dim imperceptible blabber, with a more distant phenomenological weight. From these clusters and layers emerge individuals who carry with them personal histories which extend outward in time and space, microhistorical threads that collectively weave the web of the social.
Out of these concerns surfaced a few questions. The first has to do with the special role of sound in the phenomenology of social life. These snapshots of ‘muchness,’ of crowd activity, it seemed, were globally static entities with lots of inner, local momentum. If the sound of the crowd is predominantly ‘spatial’ and static, the sound of an individual is ‘temporal’ and dynamic: microhistories move through the spaces established by collectivities. My interest in the sound of an individual thread lead to another question: what does a day sound like? To gesture at an answer, directional speakers shoot the sound of a full day, from waking up to going to bed, at the ceiling. “Real time” chugs along, indifferent to the performed time contrived down below.
What about footsteps? They are the sounds you carry with you throughout a day, throughout a life. The sound of your own footsteps—intensely intimate and personal, it seemed to me—provide a kind of assurance that you’re still there, a chance to check in with yourself. To you and to others, they provide a certain kind of immanent ontological affirmation.
A final question concerns how we represent the social and the particular tension between collectiveness and individualness of which it is composed. What might an act of “reassembling” or “reconstituting” the social look like? Crowds, networks, spheres, bubbles, globes, foams, small worlds, particles clumping into clusters, threads weaving webs—these are some of the visual and, in my attempt, sonic metaphors at the disposal of sociologists or artists or whomever.