Screening Room
An installation of acoustic bricolage
Still images of classic novels punctuated with the sound effects from their film adaptations
Still images of classic novels punctuated with the sound effects from their film adaptations
When books are adapted for film, there is a certain loss of information. The film director controls the ‘story’ in a single condensation and representation of the novel. I seek to open up space for the imagination by reducing each film to its sound effects and each book to its image, title and author. Screening Room is an installation of acoustic bricolage that encourages imaginative participation from aural and visual cues. Videos of a single still image of a classic novel are punctuated with the non-dialog sound effects from the book’s film adaptation. Wearing wireless headphones listeners move through the installation – the direction of their gaze determines the source of the audio track. As listeners shift their gaze to another monitor (another book image video), the sound track changes to the corresponding film. |
The extreme loss of information (text, dialogue & moving images) in Screening Room paradoxically enables a multiplication of meaning. The drastic reduction of information insists that the viewer return to an active role in the creation of meaning from the aural clues presented. As the viewers wander through the installation they re-weave the highly contrived sound effects from the various films. What is the unique ‘story/ies’ that a viewer tells herself while listening to the strangely familiar sounds? Rather than an experience of five different videos, Screening Room depends on the listener/viewer’s non-linear recombination of the different sounds into a single and personal acoustic narrative. The ‘visual-path’ and imagination of each visitor creates their personal aural mosaic and unique sound experience.
The BooksAll of the books chosen for Screening Room have an authoritarian foundation and various socio-cultural overtones. Fahrenheit 451 (R. Bradbury) ignites censorship, The Handmaid’s Tale (M. Atwood) plunges into reproductive rights, The Trial (F. Kafka) flounders through the nightmarish labyrinth of bureaucratic ineptitude, Lord of the Flies (W. Golding) decomposes idealized civilization into animal savagery, and nineteen eighty four (G. Orwell) terrorizes through ubiquitous surveillance. Each book is pictured on a black background standing slightly open with the title, author and library call number visible on the spine. Each film is edited to all non-dialog sounds including the opening roar of the lion, overture, grunts, groans, and footsteps etc. Each video begins with credit to the author and ends with the credits for director and sound from the film. The length of each video is different and determined by the combined length of the edited sounds. The videos loop continuously and thus gradually become more out of sync with each other so that the sounds heard at any one time will, in all practicality, never repeat.
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The Acoustic EnvironmentWhen visitors are not wearing headphones, they hear the ambient sounds of a large library – the turning of pages, rustling of papers, coughs – the strangely full sounds of people reading. While these visitors without headphones can see the covers of the different books on the monitors, they are unable to hear the film’s sound effects. The two-sided experience (+/- headphones) of the installation pays homage to both the literary and filmic histories while spawning a third experience that is neither like that of reading a book nor like that of watching a film, but a powerful and generative extension of the two.
Video Clip: 2min40 sampled from edited film sound effects
(full length ~28min). |