“Hear or imagine and”
The Greek Amphitheatre was arguably the first loudspeaker in the world.
In the work “hear or imagine and” two phenomenal moments of human acoustic exchange are brought together.
The first one refers to history: when speaking needed to become loud-speaking as required by a new theatrical form, the Greek play, a perfect architectural form for it emerged shortly after, and sound went public by way of the architectural loud-speaker: the Amphitheatre.
The second moment is the -always recurring- last moment in which sound is actually physical for us: the moment in which sound is perceived by the (human) eardrum and then transmitted to the brain. Here sound becomes personal, and is transformed into memory and meaning or is simply forgotten.
Both in scale and time the two moments could not be more distant from each other. On the other hand, sound becoming public and sound becoming personal represent key moments in cultural experience, and they are inextricably intertwined.
The work has the form of a book. Turning the eleven pages opens the sculptural form and the animated work transforms gradually from a sculptural image of the old amphitheatre into an image of a human head construed by a tomographic process.
The work was realized in the series “Acoustic Architecture – Architectural Acoustics” for the Vedute–collection of three-dimensional manuscripts. http://www.vedute.nl
The collection is preserved by the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, The Netherlands