What is real? Our group activity this week provided a unique perspective on this question – we used sound, an often overlooked but highly emotive and spatial medium, to dismantle reality, weave illusions, and re-perceive the boundaries of the ‘real’.

As the third participant, I created my work on the basis of the material recorded by the first two students: the initial ethereal reverberation of Edinburgh Castle, the subtle sound of pigeon-like chirping in the fireplace inside the wall, and the contemporary noise of the cars whizzing by on the roadside have already constituted an intertwined “soundscape” between the past and the present. On top of this, I added the sound of “cooking” – a highly everyday act, but one that appears unusually abrupt in the unfamiliar soundscape. The clash of pots and pans and the bubbling of boiling oil seem to pull the viewer out of the space of a medieval castle or a city street, and re-anchor them in a warm, inhabited reality.

This “solitaire of sounds” ends with the sound of students walking through the “Jewish Memorial in Berlin” – footsteps echoing between stone and concrete, like the echoes of history, and as a testimony of repression. The sound of footsteps echoing between the stone and concrete is like the echo of history, and also like a depressing testimony.

During this whole process, I began to realize that sound is not only a record of reality, but also a way of creating reality. It can collage, reorganize and dislocate reality, putting us in multiple times and spaces. What we hear is not necessarily real, but the perceptions, memories and emotions it inspires are disturbingly real.

In today’s visually-dominated culture, the sense of hearing has become a “potentially critical tool”. Through sound, we are not just reproducing the real, but creating a “perceptual reality” that can be felt, resonated with, and even questioned.

Recorder:Ruiqi Wang (added the sound of cooking)

Recorded by: Yuexuan Yang (added the sound of walking through the Jewish Memorial Museum in Berlin)

Week10 Sleepwalker Archives Vol.3: Sound as a Distorter of Reality / Ruiqi Wang / Curating (2024-2025)[SEM2] by is licensed under a