Sunday 9 and 16 August 2015, 2pm - 9pm:

This Is For You (ohrenhoch Berlin)

Sound installation (Premiere)
by Tina M Pearson (Canada)

Tina M. Pearson on 'This Is For You':

This Is for You is a location-specific installation that reimagines the ohrenhoch gallery space as a multi-dimensional score for personal listening within an active acoustic space. A set of texts is presented along the walls of each of the exhibition spaces, giving visitors detailed invitations to consider for perceiving and listening in the space.

This Is For You engages with the subjective territory that conjoins passive and active listening with sonic imagination, enhanced by audio signals and subtle sounds that weave in and out of the threshold of audibility. These sounds are perceived uniquely by each listener, depending on the individual’s location, height, movement, auditory ability and state of mind. This effect leaves a rich “plus one” space for the listener’s own inner realization of the score.

This Is For You dismantles the idea of a homogenous listening or performance presentation for a passive audience, placing the installation experience solidly within the control of the listener’s intentions and perceptions. The stark realities of alone-ness – in birth, death, sensation, perception – as experienced individually, solo, from a singular perspective, make the work challenging, perhaps, provocative, as experienced inside the mind.

It uncovers a desire, however, to uncover for the listener the traces of a stark, sophisticated inter-relationship with the complex world of sound – with the listener’s unique intimate inner sounds, sonic memories and imagination as the basis for a wildly individual and deep sonic relationship with reality; the present and past resonance of the building location; with the rock, root and earth it is built on; with the flora, fauna, waters, lands and sky of its biosphere.

This Is for You is informed by Tina Pearson’s preoccupation with listening and perception, including her work with attention states, breath cycles and verbal, graphic, and text scores in music composition; her 2012-2013 project A Year of 4’33” (weekly outdoor performances of John Cage’s iconic work), and by the Sonic Meditations of the American composer Pauline Oliveros.

Audio Field Report no. 34 / Sound activism 13: Interview with Tina M Pearson by Knut Remond. Limited Edition audio cassette, 8 copies numbered. Available at 'ohrenhoch, der Geräuschladen' (and heard there on headphone no.1).