LOSING SITE OF TIME

Signals Festival @ Funkhaus Berlin, DE

‘Losing Site Of Time’ is a sound and light installation that explores the speed of sound using the expansive hallway at Catalyst Institute in the former east German radio center, Funkhaus. With a speaker placed at each end, simple synchronized tones resonate through the hallway. While light travels at a mind bending 299,792,458 meters per second, sound is quite slow – at roughly 343 meters per second. At short distances, this delay is imperceptible, but with the extreme length of the hallway at Catalyst, sound takes a full ⅓ of a second to travel down the corridor. As one walks down the hallway, rhythmical patterns emerge from the delay in time that sound takes to travel from each speaker to your ears, with the patterns shifting as your location changes. Only in the center of the hallway do sounds synchronize – though even here, you don’t hear the sounds until long after they’ve occurred. The resulting composition is a collaboration between sound, light, space, time, and your location within it.