Closer (2018)

Interactive Sound Installation
Loudspeakers, Surveilance Camera

“Closer” is a fluid facade, an invader in the retreating. It keeps marching to the unreachable end / Asymptote through a strategic self-marginalization, leads everything onto finite limit at infinity.

This work consists of 4 speakers arranged in an empty room, whispering, making conversations with each other in artificial voices. Each of them can be heard but in a volume as low as people can hardly ever recognise the content. The whole room is under surveillance by a camera on the ceiling, which captures the moving path of the audience. When people subconsciously step closer to the sound source to obtain information, the sound will fall back, regenerating in another place.

In this infinite cycle of escape-regeneration, informations are constantly transmitted between the objects. Text falls into a deadlock of nothingness for the inaccessibility of itself. At the same time, flowing voices and moving listeners in a way come to synchronisation, a seemingly static state in relation to each other. While they intervene, people in the room are ignored as a part of the ongoing transmission in this space, and therefore disqualified as the “Eye of Providence”, i.e. the observer. This sort of ignorance may be like “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces” Blaise Pascal faced, which people consider as anti-anthropocentric. However, paradoxically, since it is defined as anti-anthropocentric, the “defining” itself, as an action, has already put human in the centre of everything. It is intentionally plugged into the interactive process by the artist and has to be interpreted by people’s subjective experiences. And the pursuit of rationality may hides the fact, that people, as the dominant one in this chasing game, have never stepped out of the circle of self-isolation and self-interpretation.

“Closer” is a space, a no man’s land between analog bodies and digital objects. You are free to leave, to stay put and listen to the wordless rhythm, or even to hack into this empty maze.

YUÈ