Expanding Umwelt

Sound Installation

Umwelt is the German word that means ‘self-centered world’ or ‘the world as it is experienced by a particular organism’. Every species has their own umwelt and every person has their own umwelt. But as we are human beings, our umwelts have a huge limitation. We are trapped by our senses and we are not seeing most of the action that is going on. What we experience is constrained and just a very small part of the whole. We just ignore and forget that there is always something happening beyond our perception because we can’t recognize it with our senses. The world is richer, and vaster than it usually seems to be. We need to stay awake consciously. Nothingness is for somethingness. Somethingness is in nothingness.

I was using sounds outside of our audible frequency, very low frequency sound and ultrasonic sound that humans can’t hear. The sounds are generated with an RTL-SDR device and a horn speaker. So people were exposed to loud sounds but they were not able to hear. But they were aware that something was going on. And I made a fog screen machine with 11 fans and controllers, 6,000 straws, and aluminum pipes from scratch. It creates a thin transparent layer of fog that enables the projection of images, seemingly in midair. People could walk through the fog screen without getting wet in the sense of expanding umwelt. 

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Black Aureole