Little boxes, anechoic & illuminated

Again and again, we humans tire of standing upright in the sun, protruding into the buzzing, blooming world; as Gaston Bachelard explores in The Poetics of Space, his revelatory study of the dreamworlds of domestic dwelling, we’re forever wanting to wall ourselves away in order to nourish reverie and repose. As children, we treasured ourselves in closets, burrows, and hampers, where in fragrant dark we discovered our embodied selves at once tidily composed and diffuse, disaggregate. The best spaces for such secreting, in Bachelard’s estimation, are small, dark abodes, rooted in the earth. As adults, and moderns, we may want to resist this atavistic impulse—and yet the shadowed intimacy draws us into its embrace again and again. Accessing a sudden smallness amidst the solvent shadows, we escape for awhile the prison of our edges.

A couple of recent projects at metaLAB have me thinking with a fresh, frank ingenuousness about small spaces, and sense and affect, and reverie, and wonder. Each project—A Bit in the Abyss, a shipping-container-based light and sound installation for Boston’s Illuminus festival, about which Cris Magliozzi previously posted; and To Sit Without Echoes, a pop-up, flat-packable anechoic chamber we produced in collaboration with Peter McMurray (Harvard) and Michael Heller (Pitt)—was motivated by its own unique set of questions. Although the projects started from very different places—one began with an attempt to meditate on magnitudes of cyberspace and digital memory in cosmic context; the other emerged from exploration of John Cage’s interest in the impossibility of silence—they quickly plunged us into material encounters. Starting from datasets documenting domain-name registrations and archival research into twentieth-century acoustic science at Harvard, we suddenly found ourselves sorting out knotty problems with mirrored acrylic, transducer speakers, foam insulation, and the acoustic properties of plywood, sorbothane, and medium-density fibreboard.

These material and design problems were hard! They asked everyone at metaLAB to make use of their skills in art and design, while pushing ambitiously into woodworking, sound design, and physical computing. Due to a conjunction of unanticipated rescheduling and ambitious overcommitment, both projects came due on successive weekends, and the combined stress took a toll on everyone. In the midst of this crush of fabrication and installation, metaLAB shone as a team of gritty, ingenious makers. Despite the madness, a few themes and notions emerged from our tiny boxes that have me buzzing still.

silence is a fabrication Peter McMurray, Mike Heller, and I had been speaking for the better part of a year about the composer John Cage (1912–1992) and his productive relationship with the impossibility of silence, famously activated by his visit to the anechoic chamber at Harvard in 1951. An apparatus for acoustic research built to support Harvard’s wartime research, the chamber was designed to shut out sound from outside while suppressing the reflection and propagation of sound within. The chamber no longer exists; there is a grassy sward where the large, blocky, temporary structure once stood on Oxford Street, and all that remains is a cluster of pyramidal foam tiles, wan and dessicated, treasured in the Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments.

We were pondering intersections of our interests in archives, memory, sound, art and science with Cage’s evocation of silence in the world as a kind of impossible, demoniac quality, fickle and elusive. But Peter and Mike wanted to ponder materially—they wanted to make an anechoic chamber for ourselves. Where do the possibilities of scholarly inquiry trickle away, and the chances for discovery through materials, making, and creative research well up? So with metaLAB’s collaboration and a portfolio of research funds pieced together by Mike and Peter, we set to work. With the ingenuity and elegance of James Yamada, one of metaLAB’s architects, the tracery of a structure began to take shape as measured drawings in plan and section. James curated possible materials with great care, assessing the likely anechoic properties of poplar and fiberboard, expanded metal and bluejean-based insulation.

As we went from design to construction, however, a realization gathered force: we had gone searching for silence in such fractious and recalcitrant materials. With the rest of the team working on working on the shipping container installation, fabrication challenges on the anechoic chamber imprisoned Cris for what seemed like weeks at a makerspace across the town line in Somerville, where he wrestled mightily with sheets of plywood, glue, and table saws. Day by day, help arrived: Marshall Lambert, our graphic designer, got herself cleared to use the woodshop, and soon her days too were speckled with sawdust. Don Rodrigues, a grad student specializing in text mining, commuted in from Rhode Island to lend his hand with gluing and nailing, while Peter McMurray made his way to the shop to help with measuring and marking, even after an injury left him painfully restricted to crutches. (Peter also produced the video montage below documenting the chamber’s construction, and composed three scored encounters with silence as provocations for anechoic listening, one of which is reproduced above.) In the last few days, James Yamada, our creative technologist and architect, who designed the structure with careful attention to acoustic criteria, joined the team to oversee the delicate work of joinery. Amidst a clamor of machining, welding, and other making activities washed over us from adjoining studio space, a chamber-like structure began to suggest its shape in plywood. And yet the glamor of silence seemed elusive.

Fabricating Silence from peter mcmurray on Vimeo.

Throughout the building work, I often found myself running a hand across a rough face of plywood or tapping a sheet of MDF with my knuckles, wondering where the silence was in the stuff. Even as James, Mike, and I stood on the day of installation amidst panels (laid out pell-mell in a music rehearsal room in Lancaster and freshly glued up with insulation and acoustic foam), I wondered whether silence would ever make itself as it were heard. And yet, even before the foam-and-fiber-swaddled chamber was fully assembled, we discovered that it produced an anechoic effect: I dipped my head into the uncompleted space to tighten a zip-tie, and felt the air around my head go dead and wooly. We had expected the suppression of noise from outside would be a simple enough matter, while a true anechoic effect—creating a space that actively attenuates the propagation of noises within, dampening and deflecting all detectable resonance—would be harder to achieve. What we found was precisely the opposite: although the finished chamber doesn’t block outside sounds entirely, the anechoic effect within is striking. The dark space seems to envelope tangibly, while the edges of the box—the walls, still redolent of Elmer’s glue and the binding agents of the MDF board—are difficult to intuit and locate in space. Snapping one’s fingers produces a report in the hand without resonating in the space; vocal utterance curdles, trapped in the mask of the face. Leaving the completed chamber for the first time after several minutes of anechoic listening, I was struck by the shrill timbre of my voice, which seemed to rebound shimmeringly from the walls of the conference center hall.

I might have composed a piece of prose that tried, however fumblingly, to measure the burgeoning internet against cosmic scales; similarly, we could explore the cultural history of silence in anodyne, textually-driven scholarly terms. And yet these acts of making generated questions that complement and extend the scholarship in fresh and surprising directions: toward the affective dimensions of data and space, which tend toward reverie and wonder.

affect How is connection signalled, sensed, solicited, resisted? What kinds of abundance spill over in the allegedly-efficient passage of information from node to node? What stirs and shapes the mood or atmosphere of a room, a class, an institution, a district, a network? How is silence done? We built the Anechoic Chamber for an Affect Theory conference hosted by Millersville University in Lancaster, PA, where it appeared as a material complement to Mike Heller’s panel talk on the uses of silence in science, technology, and art in the mid twentieth century. The conference presented us with a chance to muse on the affective dimension of experience and its role, complicating and ramifying, in politics, art, and everyday life. I fear that at its least useful, “affect theory” treats attention to emotional states and qualities as a kind of universal acid—always at the ready, promising neat reductions of art works, discourses, and social milieux. But approached judiciously, the affective dimension offers an inspiring vector of insight into phenomenologies of meaning, intention, connection. Without the animating presence of affect, A Bit in the Abyss and the anechoic chamber are nothing more than figured volumes; awash in the emotional energies we co-create with them, however, they become vital spaces, liquid spaces, expansive and alive. These small structures, which begin to feel like homes for or (better) shrines to the senses, don’t produce any given affect automatically (though they can, admittedly, be powerfully persuasive in suggesting or privileging forms of response). Rather, they take up and throw off various striations, defenses, borders; they welcome and succor certain dispositions while abrading or aggravating others. They invite us to come with a certain attitude, a poise. They cultivate relations. They’re co-creative.

theatrical materiality Recognizing affect’s role, I have a dawning appreciation for the theatricality of objects. Theatre—the social and embodied art form of human bodies and voices—cultivates an intersubjective liquefaction deeper and more thoroughgoing than the mere suspension of disbelief. We enter this uncanny, playful, rewarding realm through affective disposition—a shifting choreography of attitudes and receptive postures taken up by both players and audience. Carpentered together with skill, these postures generate an overspilling abundance of responsive wonder. Objects, too, participate in this choreography; things can invite and partake in theatrical play in surprising ways. Such happens perforce with stage props, of course; but objects are already poised to perform, and can enter into theatrical play with an audience without the direct intercession of players.

Again, this glamor emerged out of fractious materials, as the metaLAB team labored to make something new together. Krystelle Denis devised the structural approach to mirroring the container, and created a sound piece sampled from the ringing, dappled soundscape of the container itself, putting data into play with the gestural form of a rectangular prism sketched in angle brackets and lit with LEDs programmed by Jessica Yurkofsky. Sarah Newman and Cris both furnished crucial design-thinking rigor and inspiration. And when she wasn’t sawing and gluing the anechoic chamber, Marshall Lambert designed a winning keepsake postcard for festival visitors, which could be cut and assembled into a tiny shipping container. It must be said, too, that the whole project hummed along thrillingly thanks to the kind support of Eagle Leasing, who provided the container, granted us space, time, and advice in construction, and delivered the work to Boston’s Landsdowne Street on the day of the show. It arrived as a metal box on a flatbed truck at 6:30 in the morning; twelve hours later, it transported festival-goers to an immersive realm of wonder and speculation.

“As I have said there are certain prerequisites” to making magic of this kind with small spaces, Junichiro Tanizaki asserts in his essay “In Praise of Shadows”:

a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen… to the sound of softly falling rain… one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones.

Tanizaki is describing the outhouse of a traditional Japanese home, with its twilight mood and softening surfaces of tatami and wood. “In such places,” Tanizaki concludes,” the distinction between the clean and the unclean is best left obscure, shrouded in a dusky haze.” As Tanizaki shows, whole realms of taste and judgement emerge out of just these humble cultural commitments, adumbrated affectively in daily entanglements with space and materials. metaLAB’s two tiny houses are put to purposes more abstract and academic than Tanizaki’s cherished toilets. But as shrines to sense, affect, and reverie, they’ve proven an inspiring start.

A Bit in the Abyss from metaLAB(at)Harvard on Vimeo.