The experience of attentively listening to Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room left me amazed and speechless – starting from a familiar voice recording, it ended up being an unexpected journey leading listeners to the underlying and unfamiliar territory of the physical world. It was indeed a beautiful realization that our surroundings are beyond what it appears to be. The recording as an artwork is self-explanatory and independent from labels because of its incorporation of the spoken language. However, as listeners gradually understand the artwork’s medium and process through the sentences narrated by Lucier, the language dissolves. The absolute presence of the artist becomes an ambiguous absence and is inevitably replaced by the overpowering environment.
Reverb has been one of the most common sound effects from singing in the shower to the echoes traveling between canyons. Lucier’s piece took the sound phenomenon to the extreme. He created a gradual process of stripping any human trace from the environment – from an individual’s speaking voice to the human pride of language, and restores the space with the natural resonance frequency of the room – a pure soundscape which is both futuristic and ancient. Is sound the coded language? Or is language the coded sound? Lucier challenged the common understanding of our relationship to sounds.
Reading about the installation of I Am Sitting In A Room in MOMA reminds me of the site-specific quality of the piece. After all, the piece is about directing listeners’ attention from the recoding itself to how it is reflected by the room or the overall surrounding. As Cage exemplified in his piece 4’33, there never exists a silent moment. The aural experience is a major part of our encounter with the world – the sounds of traffic, verbal communication, music… The nature is weaved by sounds even if we don’t hear it at the moment. I believe sound art shares the common mission with other forms of art to inquire about the knowledge of the world we are living in and our connection to it.