Solar Plexus 2003
Nine channel immersive sound installation Duration sequence: 8” Synchronised looped playback Including: 8 single speakers and amplifiers 4 surround sound speakers 12 track digital hard drive Sub-woofer, Cyclon light, Dry ice machine Commissioned Site Gallery Sheffield for Parallel Worlds, 2003 with support from The Northern Media School, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield. |
Oechsler’s new sound work Solar Plexus creates multiple audio environments that frustrate the desire for closure by installing a range of overlapping and dispersed dialogues in the gallery. Under the conditions of spatial and temporal fragmentation, it becomes impossible to isolate and focus on any one of the dialogues. Instead the work sets up an experience of disorientation that replaces overall coherence with a near-ambient sound scape and thus places the visitor in the ambiguous position of being immersed on one hand and having to physically negotiate space through movement on the other.
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With an ambient, lateral register mainly premised on sound Solar Plexus opens it’s making up to the viewer. It is up to them to assemble environments, dialogues and characters, from sound fragments and their choreography, in a physical and mental act of putting things together. Whether this is a fragmentation of the mind or an enhanced expansion of the self is secondary. The primary concern of the work is the process and condition (psychic or theatrical) and of putting it all into motion.
(Edited excerpt from the Essay “Parallel Oblique and Overlapping” by Edgar Schmitz, Artist, writer, researcher at Goldsmiths College, London). |