THE DISTANCE BETWEEN #5 of 8ight

// sound // space and time // post-industrial places // post-apocalypse // sound as memory // echoes // resonances // reverberation

When we look up at the stars at night, the light we see is travelling distances so enormous that it can take millennia to travel from their emission to our retina. We thus virtually look at the past. A star visible today might actually have been extinct since thousands of years, but its light is still travelling the immensity of space. An immensity so big that we talk of light-years to measure it. Light being the fastest element, we would describe it in sonic terms as the sample rate of the physical world, the Nyquist limit against which everything is compared, everything is contained. That means that our notion of the present time always embed a spatial delay. For example, when I turn on the light at night in my room, I immediately perceive the illumination coming from the bulb reflecting on the walls, whereas in physical reality, when I look at the light bulb, I am already looking at the past because of that little distance electrons need to travel from the bulb to my retina. A past so thin, a past so quick that our bodies can’t separate the source from its time-space traveling, therefore we call it present. But for bodies far enough, where even the speed of light takes seconds, minutes or years to travel from the source to our retinas, we can grasp the distance between. The present stretches enough to become the past. When we look at the stars, we actually don’t see them. We see the dirt, the atmosphere, the space gases and particles the light had to travel through before reaching our open eyes. We look at the past, and we look at the space in between. We never see the moon, we see the light of the sun reflected by the moon filtered by the atmosphere, bouncing against molecules, reverberant in space. We see the reverberation of an echo.



Sound has this beautiful characteristic of being slow enough for us to hear its traveling in space-time. Echoes, resonances and reverberations are manifestation of waves bouncing back from its source to us with a delay big enough for us to hear the space, accessing a slight ephemeral parcel of the past. Working with reflections, architectural materials and archival voices gathered in a massive decaying space center in Armenia, The Distance Between invites the visitor to embrace this gap between our own projection of a future climatic apocalypse, the past or present apocalypse of our neighbors, and the ultimate multi-layered physical and cultural meanings sound can reveal on space-time.