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[20210527]

VAGUS by ANDREAS STOUBYE JOHANSEN and ANNA SAMSØE at FOUR BOXES GALLERY [from 20210422 to 20210503]


[Photos: Per Andersen / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Four Boxes Gallery, Krabbesholm]



Satelite-text:

… but how would you spell it?

The following text passages are excerpts from a study on onomatopoeia (words that phonetically resemble the sound that they describe) lead by the Chicago Institute of Binaural Sciences (CIBS) under the title ‘Relational studies on limitations, possibilities and influences of consonants on the creation of novel onomatopoeia within the English language on the basis of rare and undocumented binaural experiences’ co-authored by Prof. Dr. Herman Siebenmorgen and Prof. Fredric Zoltan Gabór (CIBS-press, 2012).

Part 1
(transcripts of the participants literal descriptions of extraordinary sound experiences)

Participant 1: “The house was almost offensively dull in its appearance: Neat, even pedantically wellgroomed lawn, grayish-brownish bricks, framed by its own and the neighbor’s garage. A mailbox and a ceramic sign with the owner’s name, supposedly to give a touch of humanity and liveliness to what I have come to think of as a place of absence of life. I probably would have never noticed or mentioned a site as mediocre in looks, if it wasn't for the stabbing sensation I felt whenever I passed by. The first time it happened, I didn't quite understand the cause of my unease. I was walking with headphones on, when a sudden pain shot through me, as if a thin metal thread was pushed violently through my ears. A mixture of sound and brutal touch, like an old television that's switched off with a sharp sound that tickles the eardrums but a thousand times worse. I walked on and blamed the headphones, and it disappeared after a second or two.”

(...)

“A few days later I passed by the house again, and this time I wasn't wearing headphones. It was as if I could hear pain. White noise carving a tunnel from one ear to another. And I turned to the house and I sensed death. But I shook it off and walked on.”

(...)

“I couldn't let it go. It bothered me that I was freaked out by the most unspectacular piece of property I could possibly think of. I asked a friend to join me for a walk. We got to the house: I heard the pain but kept my gaze focused on my friend's facial expressions. He kept talking uninterrupted as we passed. No sign of unsettlement. 'Did you just hear that?' I asked as we got out of the houses radius. 'Hear what?'. He had no clue.”

(...)

“No one else I ever walked with on that route ever reacted to the sound and a feeling of alienation slowly began to settle in. One day, despite the discomfort between my ears, I stopped to study the yard in front of the house. The grass looked fresh and healthy, yet lifeless and when I compared it to the gardens around it I realized a strange absence of animals. The evening sun highlighted countless mosquito dances and bees and bugs and all sorts of creatures everywhere around, except for in this single front-yard. And I noticed something else: A small black box sitting under a well-trimmed bush, not a camera, but some sort of electronic device. I am usually not much of a trespasser, but my curiosity was simply too strong. I approached the box and the closer I got, the more painful the sound vibrated in my head. There was a sticker on one side, with some sort of rodent icon. A rat or a mouse. Next to it an image of a spider and what looked like a cockroach. I got even closer and finally read the products name: 'Supersonic Pest Repeller'. I wasn't supposed to hear that sound. I still don't understand why only I could.”

Part II
The participants were asked to create an onomatopoeia using the 26 letters of the English alphabet to phonetically document the previously described sound.

Participant 1:
„Fffffffttppppssssss...”

Part 1
(transcripts of the participants literal descriptions of extraordinary sound experiences)

Participant 2: "I was watching Tour de France on the TV and I saw those men in their flashy cycling jerseys on the podium showering in a fountain of champagne, and then I focused on the bottle and it triggered a memory. The size of the bottle was... huge. Like five bottles melted into one hell of an oversized beast, but the problem was that the neck and the head of the bottle ended in what seamed to be a standard size for champagne bottles. It wasn't right. The proportions didn't match. I couldn't look at it, and then I remembered.”

(...)

“Those bottles necks … they catapulted me back to what I now think were fever-dreams I had as a child. But they weren't really like dreams. There was no time or plot or even persons. Just rotations and humming and grey flickering. There were endless rotating bodies. Like gigantic spinning geometry shapes, but build completely out of the low humming sounds. And the humming became like a dentist drill, and these endless, heavy rotations all of a sudden formed a small spike on it's bottom and then there was a bit of empty space and underneath, to my horror, another endless rotating sound twirl. And I couldn't see any of this, but I heard it as if I could see... And that space between the twirls became hell itself, all tension of the universe between those tiny little tips, it was unbearable. It was wrong. And those ridiculous champagne bottles, they shared the same quality. The same glitched dimensions, but with all tension released. I hated it.”

Part II
The participants were asked to create an onomatopoeia using the 26 letters of the English alphabet to phonetically document the previously described sound.

Participant 2 „HmmmmmmmmHHHHHHHHHHmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHmmmmmmm”

Part 1
(transcripts of the participants literal descriptions of extraordinary sound experiences)

Participant 3: "I wanted to find out what kind of sounds a Corythosaurus might have made as its mating call. The way that the dinosaur produced sound is intimately connected with the interior spaces and solids in its skull and so I used CT scan data in order to generate a digital replica of the skull. I used a 3D printer to create the nasal passages and crafted the rest of the skull out of clay”

(...)

"By blowing air in through the larynx of the replica, we can hear, for the first time in 65 million years, what the dinosaur might have sung to attract a mate.”

Part II
The participants were asked to create an onomatopoeia using the 26 letters of the Englishalphabet to phonetically document the previously described sound.

Participant 3: „Wfpfwfuhhhwpf”

[Text: Gisa Pantel]





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