hello down there
Imagine you’re floating in a narrow hole in the ground, a mile deep in the earth’s crust. It’s useless to scream because nobody would hear you. And there you are, for the rest of your very quiet and still life, getting to know your new neighbor, mother earth. It wouldn’t be a comfortable way to complete your up to now agitated and anxiety filled life, but if you were promised a hoist back up to civilization after an hour or so, it might be worth the day-long effort it would take to get you down and back up. Your day would be filled with the earth belching, squealing, screaming, farting, rumbling, whatever earths do when they’re not being paid attention to. If you’re an environmentalist, it’s your version of swimming with dolphins. If you’re a monk, it would make your wooden, mountain-top shanty seem like Las Vegas in comparison. In fact, if you’re a monk, you’d buy a one way ticket.
Doug Aitlen
Los Angeles artist, Doug Aitken has made such a hole. While you can’t go down it, he makes the trip more convenient by bringing the sonic chat show up to the surface. Aitken has just completed a five-year project that demands you to make a visit to a sculpture park in the middle of Brazil. In the same vein as James Turrell, Aitken’s project requires remoteness, a sense of place, and a nice spot to move some dirt. He’s in luck because a collector by the name of Bernardo Paz has provided him space to do it in Brazil’s Instituto Inhotim. We mere dreamers, however, are out of luck because the space is a six hour drive from Rio de Janeiro. Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion is billed as a quiet space on a hill, lined with frosted glass on all sides, presumably to take you out of one world, and into another. Inside the room is the hole, with a microphone - a really good and brave microphone - dropped one mile down into a concrete-reinforced earth barrel. The sounds are retrieved, amplified and filtered through room speakers, where, we’re told, the noise never repeats itself. We’re going on the theory that Aitken isn’t taking us for a ride, and the microphone really is down there. And it’s really making the sound coming out of the speakers.
The project is such a great idea that it’s unthinkable no one has thought to use the internet as a delivery network. Earth racket to everyone, anytime, anywhere. Science museums, to mention the obvious patron, would love this, but it’s equally interesting as art. Keep the hubbub going 24 hours a day by sealing it inside a quiet room in a gallery or museum. I’m sure there isn’t money to be had by Aitken’s gallerists to do this, but the outrageous publicity wouldn’t hurt sales for any of Aitken’s other projects either.
Spock, the better days
I’d even settle for a peaceful room in a gallery with limited visitation rights. The gallery could sort out a queue system where visitors spend 15 minutes in a darkened, sound-baffled room, and we could all imagine ourselves trapped in the great void of nothingness. Like Spock when his body was shot off into space. Except Spock was dead, sort of. You could even send in a hopelessly stubborn child to correct misbehaviour. Let him scream his complaining little lungs out. You couldn’t send in Paris Hilton though, because the earth would probably run away. And then where would we be? Floating in Spock-like nothingness watching the earth flee the solar system.