To hear on Sunday 14 and 21 August 2016, 2pm - 9pm:
You Will Understand It, When You Come Alone
(2016, Premiere)
Interactive audio installation
by Eric Dickson
Eric Dickson on 'You Will Understand It, When You Come Alone':
You Will Understand It, When You Come Alone is an interactive audio installation, engaging the Ohrenhoch 2016 Soundactivism theme: “to what extent can we consider all of us as foreigners – as ‘others’?” As visitors move around the gallery’s basement space, they trigger motion detectors, thus unleashing a soundscape that ranges from birdsong to political speeches. The nature of this soundscape, however, is intentionally elusive. The basement space at Ohrenhoch is divided into two main chambers; a person exploring a given room within the space will only ever hear sounds emanating from the other room. If more than one person is detected in the space at any given time, the audio cuts out completely. Thus, a visitor who wishes to engage the installation must enter alone, and will never reach the source of any sound while it is being broadcast. As such, the visitor must remain an outsider throughout the course of the gallery visit, physically apart from the source of joyful sounds or straining to decipher marginally audible voices spoken at a distance. The installation thus invokes the alienating effects of some modern technologies, and also compels the experience of permanent exclusion as enforced by unknown, arbitrary rules. The relationship between visitors’ movements and the resulting soundscape is governed by a variety of computer algorithms; control of the installation passes back and forth among these algorithms, producing a shifting, unpredictable audio environment.
Audio Field Report no. 51 / Soundactivism 30:
Interview with Eric Dickson by Knut Remond.
Limited Edition audio cassette, 8 copies numbered. Available at 'ohrenhoch, der Geräuschladen' (and can be heard in the ohrenhoch archive space on headphone).
Eric Dickson (*1975) is an installation artist and politics professor at New York University. Originally trained as a theoretical physicist, his academic work studies political societies from strategic and psychological perspectives: why are some authorities seen as legitimate, while others are not? Why do citizens believe what they believe about power structures and the world around them? His artistic practice probes related questions and explores the frontier between storytelling and installation art through interactive audio installations that embrace literary, technical, and site-specific challenges. He lives and works in New York and Washington.
Website Eric Dickson