Category: Miscellaneous

“… for hours, days, or weeks at a time”

sedative sounds

Martin Beck’s exhibit at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum reinvigorates an old story and pokes at sound as a medium we move through and with, often without recognition.

Informed by the “environments” records in the 1970s, which aided in synchronizing work, sleep and relaxation, Beck works to understand our industrialized soundscape as it relates to neuroscience, behavior, our internal worlds, and of course: capitalism.

His title ‘for hours, days, or weeks at a time’ is reminiscent of the infinite lull, hum, and buzz we find ourselves engrossed in a hyper produced world, whether self-selected or accidental background noise.

The exhibition uses sound, drawing, video and installation to curate a lively yet sterile environment, controlling the chaos we find ourselves drenched in our day to day worlds.

His multimedia approach to art including research in architecture, design, music and population culture further highlights the post-modern conundrum of ever connected spheres and disciplines and places them in conversation to work together in understanding our current amalgamation in some coherency.

His final installation to this series understanding our surround sound world includes large graphite sketches of an ecosystem dominated by ferns, titled with his selected disparate environments.

This biophonic calm induced with his fernscapes works to offer alternatives to our environments that are fundamental the only real environments, natural. This call to reinvigorate into natural worlds simultaneously helps propel climate justice as we begin to note our cognitive differences in natural and built environments.

The eleven vinyl records from 1970s “environments” were marketed as psychoacoustic, referring to how hearing is not solely mechanical but a sensory and perceptual event. In this way Beck builds on this understanding and contrasts to the natural and meditative sounds from his predecessor.

As an almost antithetical principle to the “environments” self-optimizing goals, he folds in the competitive nature of our built environments using sound as a way to understand the information onslaught.

This refers to what we understand as the ‘attention economy’, treating human attention as commodity and scarce resource. This prevalence in digital buzz as aided by smartphonification creates slops and sludge as opposes to autonomous invigorating time spent.

These ideas of an ‘attention economy’ harken back to haughtily contested ‘hedonism’ and its counterpart, ‘eudaimonism’, which argues for longevity and sustainable fulfilment as opposed to fleeting bolts of pleasure.

These themes of fulfilment, hedonism, nihilism, the attention economy, and an industrialized world call to select our surroundings and be intentional in our curation of pleasures and pains as they warp into a larger system and environment.

Beck compresses these various environments and points to a lack of control in our sensorial and psychological experiences as impacted subliminally through these man made soundscapes.

His work calls to action intention in the viewer and works to sublimate subordinance to an industrialize world, asking us to intentionally curate and engage with internal renderings informed by the world around us.

Maybe its more than just ‘touching grass’, we have to hear it in the wind too.