Jason Kahn
"Space Text Sound"
(2017)
Editions 006 book
12x17 cm
244 pages
ISBN 978-3-033-06072-2
Price including post to Europe: 25.00 euros
Price including post to rest of the world: 30.00 euros
Space Text Sound documents text material used in three of my
recent installations: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Hong
Kong (After Perec) (2016), Drifting (2016) and Other Ghosts
(2015). All three of these works investigate the nexus points
between the production of space through sound and how text
can be used to reflect on this process. I’m interested in how
words can convey the sense of place sounds can and, beyond
this, how these words impart a feeling for inner spaces, often
more commonly referred to as reading between the lines. By
entering this inner space of text we can also approach the
notion of hearing between the sounds, sensitizing ourselves to
that void where spaces form, mutate, collide. Reading through
these texts after the installations were long over, I found that
they stood on their own apart from the greater works they were
initially a component of and therefore valid standing on their
own presented in book form.
--------------------------
When I entered
the courtyard
only ventilator
hum and swinging
broom whisking
Beijing dust to
the street
from where it
came and to
which I return
bicycle bell
warning my
way.
--------------------------
From my balcony
the drum tower
a dark shape
on the
horizon
night is falling
soft music sifts
across the houses
to disappear in
a corridor of
traffic marking
the end of
the night.
--------------------------
Reviews:
“How can words convey a sense of place?” This is a relevant question not only for our visually obsessed society in general, but for sound art in particular where textual material is involved. Jason Kahn (you can read his interview in Neural #55) pays great attention to text in his installations, especially those which can be qualified as “site-specific”. This book includes the text of three of Kahn’s installations: “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Hong Kong (After Perec)”, “Drifting” (both released in 2016), and “Other Ghosts” (in 2015). Here he compares the practice of “reading between the lines” with “hearing between the sounds”, as every text reinforces the sounds described, but, surprisingly, is still valid on its own. So, avoiding to classically define this book as the “libretto” of those installations, we can instead freely dive into the sound evoked by the words, completely assimilable to a specific type of sound poetry. They effectively serve one of Kahn’s major principles: “transmitting a sense of place”. In his opinion it’s not just an aesthetic quality, but a political one, as a rising awareness of the space leads to better chances to fight alienation and increase solidarity. In addition, this book should be read in relation to its original production (the installations), but if it should be found by accident, and we ignore its references, it’d still be a fascinating poetry book about unexpectedly heard sounds, describing a whole series of engagements. In its own right, it can be seen as a music release in words.
>Alessandro Ludovico, Neural, 2017
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