moon tide lullaby: fragility of sonic memory 月潮搖籃曲：聲音記憶的脆弱性 (2019-)
Time-based performative sound installation
ice, water, sound, text, ink, paper, glass, electronics
The waves in my room: mental time traveling
When was the first time I heard the sound of waves in my room — that has become a mystery. Between the threshold of consciousness, I imagined there was a giant creature breathing in its shelter, a port, an invisible black hole in my room. I felt safe and secure, listening to the waves in my room reminded me of the island surrounded by the ocean, the place I came from, the mother womb, the home. It turned into a lullaby to comfort me to sleep, the memories emerged and dissolved in dreams. One day, I found out the sound was coming from the fridge — the freezer inside talked loudly during the night, to expand the volume of water, to give birth to the ice.
Tide follows the tension between the moon and the earth to change its volume, the level of intimacy rises and falls through time, we observe the shape of moon to learn their languages: the circulation of life and death, the shadows of glimmering sunlight.
We pass our history through languages / senses / cells in order to sustain our subjective consistency: where do our memories go and how do they recreate themselves through time and imagination? How do our identities re-empower and re-shape us?
From [ice, novel, fact] into [water, poetry, imagination] into [air, word, emptiness], we engage in the moment ice melts and freezes again and again. Witness the voice fading in, memories speak and chant, they become a movable existence, transcending time and space, shaping the circulation of memory, as we remember ourselves. We co-exist in between the dialogue, and experience the present together.
月潮搖籃曲：聲音記憶的脆弱性 （moon tide lullaby: fragility of sonic memory）運用了在台灣、英國兩地錄製的田野錄音、與冰融化到水的物質特性，製成了一個充滿了即興意味的發聲裝置。
作品中的聲音與文字在冰、水轉化的過程中隨著時間改變狀態，借代了身份與記憶的游移，與意義與無意義之間的過度，探討著聲音記憶只能存於時間之中的脆弱本質。記憶是流動的冰，詩句埋在冰裡，冰融的微弱雜訊與化為水的振動隨著時間開始演化、再造、於是過去與未來不再絕對，我們共存於此時此刻。
A living cycle, and melting ashes
moon tide lullaby: fragility of sonic memory is a performative sound installation built as a living cycle — melting, sounding, and freezing again, standing in for the circulation of life and death.
Ice spheres hang from above. Some carry the voice of the sea inside, recorded at the shore, surfacing as the ice thins; others hold a listening ear, catching the faint sounds of the ice as it comes apart. Meltwater falls, resonating in the glass vessels below and meeting the handmade contact microphones, returning in real time as sound: the drop becomes both performer and instrument. Day after day, I record the drops as they fall.
Other spheres rest in petri dishes, each one a cell, the smallest element of life, observed through a microscope: our eyes become the scope, and the scope melts in time. Inside each, a line of poetry on tracing paper is revealed as the ice retreats and blurred again with every refreezing, until the words can no longer be read — blurry words, blurry voices in the water, yet never gone.
moon tide lullaby: fragility of sonic memory, Heightened
States Of Awareness, LCC Typo Gallery, London, 2019. Photo 2,3,4,5 by Robert Chang Chien
The ice responds to room temperature, to weather, to the body heat of those who come close, melting faster or slower, tuning itself to the room. Each morning the ice spheres are born again, while the electronics, frozen and thawed again and again, slowly lose their sensitivity. The sound grows quieter through the exhibition, until it falls silent.
moon tide lullaby: fragility of sonic memory,
Grand Prize in New Media category, Nanying Awards Group Exhibition, Xinying Cultural Center, Tainan, 2020. Photo credit: 馬祥騰
moon tide lullaby: installation music 0°
An electroacoustic piece composed from the daily recordings in Heightened States Of Awareness, LCC Typo Gallery, London, 2019. >> Listen