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Soundman at SONICA (2017), Ljubljana (SI)

Soundman (2017) is a sonic sculpture that explores sound reflection in dialogue with the viewer’s perspective. It’s assembled with readymade elements: a satellite dish, polished as a mirror surface, reflecting the whispering sounds of a polyethylene tube, that dances to an airflow provided by a small ventilator. This assemblage generates an unpredictable composition of sound and image which the visitor can experience from multiple perspectives.

The title of Soundman refers to ‘Soundman-cyclus’ (1981-1990), a series of installations by electronic music pioneer, theater maker and media theorist Dick Raaijmakers (1930-2013). ‘Soundman-cyclus’ in turn was inspired by ‘Night Owls’, the first sound film with American comedians Laurel & Hardy, from 1930. In the film Laurel & Hardy are two burglars trying to enter a house in the middle of the night. Almost all sounds they produce while trying to pass the obstacles are explicitly followed by a ‘…shhh!…’ Ironically for this film, a large part of the twenty-minute costly soundtrack was deliberately unused – a sublime statement in film history. In this context Soundman is a semiotic prolongation of Raaijmakers’ pieces, in its effort to dramatise the perception of sound and light phenomena.

Night Owls (1930), by Laurel and Hardy