Speaking

 

An installation consisting of three stations each with a partially insulated stainless steel box, approx. 18″ x 18″ x 3″. Each box contained dry ice. The room temperature and the warmth of a viewer’s breath created frost on the box. To the left of each box was a “speaking device”, consisting of a funnel with a steel stencil on it. The stencil was a symbol abstracted from Alexander Graham Bell’s vocalization diagram for teaching the deaf to speak. Each symbol related to the sounds required the user to say the letter on the box: either the number one, the letter “I” or zero.

Viewers vocalized the character using the speaking device, while placing it against the box. At times there were a number of people pressed against the plates speaking the sounds of “one”, “I” or “zero”. Impressions from the physiological gesture of speaking were left in ice on the plate’s surface.

Text from the exhibition

Pythagoras conceptualized numbers to represent things. The idea of one emerged after considering a fingering position on a string which made a particular sound. The sound was a point of reference in a system he designed to create order. He did not conceptualize zero. Zero did not exist until later.

Language is a useful system of abstractions, though at times it can formulate our perceptions too concretely. As irrational as it might seem, a name is frequently thought to be equal in all ways to the thing it represents. We go beyond allowing the name to merely represent the thing. Instead, we allow the abstraction to interpret the object for us. This use of language functions like a belief; but this is not surprising. Religions have often found language useful for reinforcing beliefs. In the practice of many religions it is common to find words interchangeable with key deities.

In certain religions, zero was seen as a symbol for God. “One” however, was always what zero was not. Zero and one are the fundamental units of our coding systems, (all forms of language, including computer programming). They are rooted as symbols and deities in our belief systems. They are part of all we speak, and so all we believe exists. At times, they represent what has become too concrete in our culture.

Between the zero and the one, beneath all language, is an unnamed aspect of your physiology. You can sense it when you speak, when you feel the vibration of your vocal cords, when the abstractions recede and the tangible advances.

These three stations are meant to provide places to contemplate what is tangible beneath all spoken beliefs. They present a transition from the abstraction of language into the physical form of voice, and then into a third physical form—ice.