a box within boxes

3-channel video, 3-channel audio, mirrors, plasma television displays, loudspeakers, boxes

commissioned for resonant bodies, Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain/Centre d’Arte Mobile/Erba, Besançon, France, December 2011-January 2012

“Eloquence begins by standing on coarse sand, facing the chaotic ocean and breaking pebbles in your teeth, and ends with the sublime. We should define sublimation as the passage from solid to gaseous, a softening.

I do not know if talking of filters will help us understand how thunder, noise, the vibration of sound waves (whether audible or felt through our skin), subtly become meaning. There is no reason to discount the hypothesis.

The question of knowledge, of the sensible and of language is located somewhere on the graduated spectrum of this fan, somewhere in the range it encompasses between hardness and softness, this partitioned, compart­mentalized distance, strewn with obstacles, twists and turns, and clear pathways. A box within boxes where the sound of cannon-fire gradually transforms itself into a whispered confidence.

At what point on this path do we leave behind hardness for permanent softness? When? The time is not far off for us.”

from “The Five Senses” by Michel Serres