TAYLOR MCINTOSH

TAYLOR MCINTOSH

“Drone Watch for Cage”

2014

4:33

digital screen capture with sound

Each and every day I tried as hard as I can to segregate myself from as much as possible, including sound, for twenty or thirty minutes.  Even at the most silent of these times there is still audible sound and often times I imagined what it would be like if I could stack these moments of “silence” on top of each other?  How much sound would there be?  What sorts of sounds?  How heavy could that stacked audio become?  With mostly low frequency sounds present in “silence”, what would be the result of stacking those?  Maybe it would become pure feedback or reverb?

With an understanding of John Cage’s thoughts on silence, and its inability to be fully experienced, I took a performance of his 4’33” and recorded fifty generations of it (recording the playback of the previous recording) in the same manner that Alvin Lucier created his I Am Sitting In A Room.  The result was much different then I ever expected and my findings were quite intriguing. 

I realized how eerie unnerving the sound was and quickly understood what visual need to be paired with it: drone footage.  Each and everyday the possibility of someone watching us is so high at every moment… We can only imagine what that might look like to the Observer.  Just like sound, it is almost impossible to be alone or free of an Observer in today’s world and so they are inescapable.  We cannot remove ourselves from sound or surveillance no matter how hard we try.  There is something to listen to and someone watching us.  That is our everyday reality.