100 circles for the head

2010
headphones, graphite on graph paper
dimensions variable
re((sound)), hunt gallery, webster college, st. louis, missouri
esta casa/esta sonida, miracaibo, venezuela

description:

100 circles for the head is a wall-mounted set of drawings and an accompanying headphone-based sound recording. The recording documents the acoustic trace of drawing 100 circles in three different iterations: one hundred single circles, two groups of fifty circles, and four groups of twenty-five circles. The work is presented over headphones alongside each of the drawings from which the recordings are made. The limited movement required by drawing, tracing, moving, or marking circles functions as an attempt to focus the observation of sound through a limited set of actions.

The viewer/listener only has access to the temporal traces of physical action while on the headphones they hear the shifts in minute movements as the drawing unfolds. This draws attention not to causality (because the gesture appears unchanged) but to the seeming incompatibility of two opposed modalities: seeing and hearing a gestalt perceptual scene.