Water Time Zone __ Mani-flow
Den Haag, The Netherlands (2022)
Water Time Zone – Mani-flow is a mani-folded aural installation, taking the “malleability of listening” as a point of departure. Through offering a bodily experience of the inter-changing relationships between the listener, water and sound, it explores human’s prepositional relationship with sound – rather than interpreting sound as an object or a phenomenon, it conceives sound as a process, in which the listener plays an active role to enact it through sounding.
Water Time Zone
Beginning with Water Time Zone, the concept of time is diffracted into various sonic happenings as perceived in water – both as a source and a medium. Field-recordings of various aquatic forms are the crafter of this installation: ranging from the summer waves of the North Sea to the ice cracking of a nameless frozen lake. These “water sounds” shapes an experiential temporality beyond clock-time system:
lucid, non-linear, changes exist to stay still.
As an omnipresence of life, water encapsulates not only the very impulse of a human-being, but also the seasonal changes, climates, and the circadian cycle of other livehood on this planet. Thanks to the “transformational” essence of water, the marks of life are reflected in the large palette of sonic happenings it inherited from its environment. Water Time Zone offers a multitude of temporal perception through the interpretation of water as a sounding body along the time axis, letting the variety of life rhythms found in aquatic field-recordings sing all at once in this work.
Meanwhile, it is also an invitation for one to listen with full sensitivity and awareness. Presenting water in both physical and immaterial (sonic) forms, it offers an experience that one could “touch” the “water sounds” with any part of the body–be it ears, skin or the mind. Through this tactile sonic interaction, it offers one space to explore oneself with sound – not as an object, nor a medium, but an embodied process. In body terms, it questions: what does water sound like to you? How does it transform when it is listened to and through, with a different preposition to you as a listener?
Mani-flow
After the first listening to/through water in Water Time Zone, one is invited to Mani-flow, where the malleability of listening is explored in the inter-changeable relationship between listener and the listened by a new preposition with water: listen not “to”, “with”, nor “through”– it asks one to listen “within” water, where listening becomes a continuous dialogue between the perceiver and the perceived.
Here, listeners perceive sounds through the conduction of their own body in water, with water-reactive ceramics pieces as another layer of sounding. By unfolding an experience with water as a co-presence, it opens up a refreshing perspective of the relationship in between sound, water and I – sound as perceived through not only our ears or our very skins, but a sounding process that one (I) actively listen with an awareness that one’s body is bathing within the sound of this material presence that constitutes over 80% of their own body.
It is as though silent whisper from one’s own voice: whilst water can be listened to through, within it can simply be listening – wherever “I” am placed upon.
