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Sitting in Rooms

In 1970, Alvin Lucier sat in a room and recorded himself telling us ‘I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice.’ Like Lucier I have recorded my voice and played it back into the room exploiting the distinct resonances of that room I was sitting in to erase slowly, through repetition, the semantic meaning of the words that tell us of my location. And with this expunging of my voice’s semantic function the symbolic function of the room is eroded too. The repetitions erase its architectural certainty rather than stabilizing it. In the end I am not sitting in a room at all anymore. Instead I am sitting in pure sound; the reverb and repetition having performed an acousmatic reduction to the core of sonic timespace: that of my enunciation and that of the viewers listening. The place of performance becomes the place of listening, the timespace of production coinciding with the timespace of perception and yet a multiplicity of places are thus produced that erode the notion of an authentic room while offering us the experience of our own temporality. Sound shatters spatial certainty and builds time of fluid rooms. My voice builds a room that knows no outside and yet it has no boundary. I am in it or it does not exist. It belongs not in language and architecture but in the body of the listener, who takes up the extension of my body to extend his own. The recorded voice does not extend into a space that is already there but builds the space that is already there, realizing the inner necessity of my body, but builds the space of my voice in the time of my perception.This space is not authentic or rooted; it does not offer function or order. It is the unordered timespace of the voice as sound, which does not follow language to build a room but erases the notion of roominess in the concrete experience of words as sounds erasing their own meaning in timespace of the building.

I am sitting in the studio

I am sitting in the living room

I am sitting in the garden

I am sitting in Paola's rom

I am sitting in the prayer room

Farah

Mulla

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