Binaural acousmatic film (13 minutes)
The medium of film is utilised here as a contemplative device to elicit a perceptive intuition beyond the limits of logocentric knowledge. The work presents sound and video recorded in two distinct environments—the forest and the city—each of which signify two modes of knowledge acquisition. The city, symbolising man’s intellectual assertion of order, reason and rationality over the material world; of knowledge disseminated via words, epitomised in the library. The forest, long mythologised as a place on the periphery, a place of sanctuary away from civilisation; the age-old refuge of poets, hermits and monks that have renounced worldly life to seek a form of knowledge that is incommunicable via language. In each scene the synchronised audio has been detached from the visual and replaced with sound from the opposing space; the city encroaches on the forest, the forest spills over into the city. The resultant promiscuity of the acousmatic space that emerges throughout the film provokes a sense of unreality that contrasts sharply with the realism of the audiovisual material in and of itself. In disconnecting sound from its visual associations of source and meaning, the acousmatic veiling prompts a type of ‘profound’ listening where the inner characteristics of the sonic matter can be apprehended in a ‘blind’ or ‘reduced’ manner. The disclosure of the irreducible traits of sound such as impermanence, motion and becoming serves to collapse the superficial duality between hearer and heard, provoking a unification between the city and the forest in the act of listening.