Ei Arakawa and Sergei Tcherepnin

Looking at Listening: Insights from the Forest

Part of a series entitled Looking at Listening, this piece invited the spectator to experiment and consider sound as a kinetic and synesthetic process, where multiple experiences and senses can cross. The presented photographs were selected from the New York Public Library and found in an archive called ‘Listening,’ with the sub-genres ‘town meetings,’ ‘investigation,’ ‘audiences 1960–1970’ and ‘conversation.’ Taking the photographs from the city’s archive of frozen moments of audio exchange, Arakawa and Tcherepnin give sound and movement back to past moments. In each of the photographs, people are listening in different situations—public, and private. Transposed from recorded events to archival status, then from facsimile inks to copper and reflective aluminum, these moments are then connected to a sound device playing Tcherepnin’s compositions that have been recorded in previous performances in New York and Tokyo. The artist’s replace the original auditory fundamentals of each of these images and create a new meaning to the images. The work is activated by the public and thus transformed into a sound sculpture. Invited to manipulate the metal plates as instruments, deafening the metal with fabric or whirling them around, the visitors create sound ripples, dissolving the visible aspects of the work to give form to listening.