While doing a number of trials with prototypes placed under the arches, I thought about ways of forming a nested structure that would transmit sounds which would then be amplified by what silence was believed to reveal. When talking about deserts, I mentioned the state of permanent attention they bring about – a sort of prelude to listening. The relative silence in Capc is also a powerful indicator that should contribute to a similar state of auditory vigilance.
What I'd conclude is that total silence is inimitable, since we generally don't like anything provisional that lasts too long. And time also seems too vague. We prefer intermediate durations, which are easier to bring about with all sorts of primer. We also try to equip them as quickly as possible with trigger mechanisms – sounds that have been interpreted, or even imagined; all sorts of potential scenes combined with reality, and correlated perfectly with the vagaries of auditory memory. The idea that each unique instant belongs to a general order was given rich musical expression (and no doubt its most complex compositional method) by Morton Feldman, who assigned total responsibility to memory: "Form doesn't interest me. We know what form is, what division into parts is, etc. What interests me is the idea of scaling, or what I'd call natural proportions. […] Personally, I'm concerned with other forms of memory. The longer the piece, the better people remember what they've heard."
It'll be understood that my setup's not going to turn the exhibition space into an "acoustic hall", but that it's the metabolic nature of the whole system (architecture plus work) that's supposed to amplify the listening context and give it all the more density. Like what an apparent wind can do, in a way, with an object in movement when it catches up with the real wind, this simple vector will construct own its unity, its own energy envelope, starting from the frame of the building.
There's also a permanent drone generated by seven seconds of reverberation – a very faint background noise that leaves no room for an absolute void. We're enveloped in a sort of full continuation, a trace that soon becomes familiar. This acoustic detail's very important, because you're quite right: theoretically there should be a loop effect (feedback) between the building and the sound work. And in that case we'd talk about an apparent withdrawal rather than silence. In the largest possible amplitude of this process, the space itself and the setup it contains are at one and the same time transmitters and receivers putting into practice a simple principle according to which the signal is constantly re-injecting itself, thereby accentuating the background movement that I often talk about.
It's on the basis of these almost subliminal phenomena that Dial-O-Map 25° will produce relative immersions. Like most of the installations I exhibit, it will have no beginning or end. The visitor will be able to engage with it at any moment.