Reading Response 2 – Sitting In A Room – Chenlan Yao

I am not deliberately making my self a sickish people, but I was indeed suffering tinnitus while experiencing the artwork I am Sitting in a Room. The subtlely humming tune in my right ear tingling and buzzed my brain. As the progress bar processed, the sound in the artwork went muddled, while creating a strange but interesting audio experience as it seemed to be moving and wandering around inside my brain, passing from the left sound channel to the right one and creating a resonance that almost exploded my head. This is my direct and first impression of Lucier’s work, not cool, aggravated my uncomfortableness, but unique, I assumed.

I believe that both my direct feeling and the meaning of creating this artwork show some relationship with the concept “synesthesia”. From my perspective, it is at first an audio project but finally makes my mind unwell. I can feel some geometric shapes moving randomly when I listen to it. On the other hand, Lucier is trying to catch the voice of a room through first making the voice of a man. From the man voice to the frequency of the room, it is also somehow a kind of synesthesia between the voice and feeling of different objects. 

Sound is intangible, thus it is necessary to have an intermedium to exaggerate it and make it “tangible”. Everything can have sound, even including a room. However, the way to make the voice of a room come into being is actually what Lucier did, and the theory of art contains.

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