Schizotopic
Schizophonic
2009, In-situ installation in public space
Headphones, door handles
Schizophonic
Passers-by find themselves on the fine line between public and private space, perceiving sounds from both dimensions as their ears become the interface between the two spaces. They access a pre-recorded sound field consisting of interior sounds (left ear) and exterior sounds from the street (right ear), both recorded simultaneously at window level by positioning one recording device outside and one inside the room (some exterior sounds are also recorded by the internal microphone and vice versa). When listening through the headphones, the relative intensities of the tracks are equalised and a time delay is added to the indoor recording. As certain sounds pass "in one ear, out the other", the listener experiences an expansion of the headspace, as if the sound were travelling between the ears.
Schizotopic
A reversal of interior (private) and exterior (public) space is introduced by placing window handles, accessible to passers-by, on the outside of the window. This creates a contradictory environment of protection - access - containment of a proprietary nature. An act that could be seen as an invitation to rethink what would follow a revocation of belonging.
They'll have said who I am, and I'll have heard, without an ear I'll have heard, and I'll have said it, without a mouth I'll have said it, I'll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that's what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don't belong to either.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Grove, 1991, p383.