Title: Sounds and Shadows
Date: 1998
Video of the seven minutes sped up 700 times
with audio of 200 women and men
reciting the alphabet and an alphabet prayer
Title: Status Quo Synagogue
in Trnava, Slovakia built in 1897
(installation site for Sounds and Shadows)
For two years, I worked with these seven minutes. I tried to find a way to concretize and freeze the vanished image. I wanted to give weight to the seven minutes, to the vanished light. I photographed (at 12 "frames" per minute) a projection of a 7-minute video of the light beam moving across the wall in Trnava. I used these "frames" as the templates for hand cutting the 84 frames into tissue paper and making a fragile book that requires great care in handling.
I wanted to give weight to the seven minutes, to the vanished light. I used the "frames" of the 7 minute video as the templates for laser-cutting 84 glass plates presented in 7 book boxes in groups of 12 -- each box containing one minute.
The work I was installing in the former synagogue was an audio work, Sounds and Shadows, an invisible installation, with no objects, only voices of 200 people speaking 21 different languages, saying the alphabet and the "Alphabet Prayer" (Dear God, I do not know how to pray, but I can recite the alphabet. Please take my letters and form them into prayers.) The female and male voices were divided and played separately upstairs and down in the synagogue. Each movement of the score was written in the shape of a Star of David and laid out in that shape in an audio-editing program.
