A D R I A N W O O D
Room Tone
This is a live, hyperlocal FM radio broadcast of the artist narrating their experiences of rooms they have been in -- the smell, the feel, the crowd, the temperature, the vibe. Each 2-3 minute monologue is punctuated with a 1-2 minute recording of "room tone"-- an ambient indoor recording which, in audio applications, is often used to establish neutrality or erase noise.
Duration: 90 minutes.
Over the course of the 90 minutes, Adrian narrated memories of over a dozen different spaces. Between each segment of narration, they played a recording of "room tone" from their archive. Because neither the voice nor the recorded audio were amplified in the space, listeners may have seen Adrian speaking or noticed the audio setup -- but they would have to put headphones on to hear what Adrian said, even if they were only a few feet away.
This performance is an ambient work that articulates space like a watercolor wash. Its goal is to make more obvious the ways in which no space is ever neutral -- we are always carrying our memories and associations that lead us to respond to sounds and ambience through many layers of experience that live in our bodies.
This performance was part of a group show of audiovisual installations. Listeners were encouraged to move around the space with their portable radio and headphones, creating impromptu collaborations that mixed Adrian's "room tones" with other artists' visual presentations.
For Travelogues, part of the Elastro A/V festival October 2023 at Elastic Arts, Chicago. Curated by Ruby Que.
All photos above by Mikey Mosher.
This performance was complemented by a workshop I led for SUNGJAE LEE's performance class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The workshop walked performance students through a writing process that responded to their built environment and its relationship to their memories of spatial situations they had experienced in the past.
