Listening to the Lightbox : The Wooden Lightbox

Listening to the Lightbox: Recollecting a Secret Art (Samuel Thulin, 2010)

Listening to the Lightbox: Recollecting a Secret Art (mp3)

This sound piece offers a “recollection” of Alex Mackenzie’s February 15, 2010 performance of The Wooden Lightbox: A Secret Art of Seeing at Concordia University. I selected audio from field recordings collected during the event and a preceding telephone interview and manipulated and re-composed these elements in an impressionistic manner, mimicking the contours of a memory, where one fleeting idea dissolves into another in a barely traceable process.

Using several of the same techniques that Mackenzie employs in the original work—particularly the creation of loops and the alteration of the speed and the direction of playback—the piece plays with similarities and differences between sound and image as materials and explores the process of using audio to recall a highly visual experience. The piece also borrows from Mackenzie’s fascination with cinema spaces, audience interaction, and chance occurrences, incorporating many sounds originating from beyond Mackenzie’s own creation, such as the sound of photographs being taken and chatter before the event. In these ways, though the recollection eschews accurate representation, it follows from the very processes that are central to the event it recollects.

Thanks to Alex Mackenzie, Zoë Constantinides, Kim Sawchuk, and Marie-Hélène Lemaire.

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Samuel Thulin is a musician, researcher, and sound artist living in Montreal. His work is concerned with concepts of mobility and of place, as well as the history of media and technology. He is a member of the Mobile Media Lab and PhD student in the Communication Studies department at Concordia University. Originally from rural New Brunswick, his work always retains a hint of bucolic influence even when most concerned with the urban.