Alphabet Huts zzZ and Walls Have Ears

As part of the exhibition 'Head With Many Thoughts' curated by Neringa Bumblienė, Julija Fomina, Virginija Januškevičiūtė, Ūla Tornau and Asta Vaičiulytė

Alphabet Huts (💤), 2020

Installation (plasterboard construction, color, sound, light, oxygen leak)

Variable Dimension

With production support from the CAC Vilnius.

The letter Z was first used by Henri David Thoreau to describe the sound of crickets, and has now been adopted for cartoon sleep. In the exhibition, Z is a letter form space in which restful disorientation may reset the capacities of the mind.

Alphabet Huts are the protospace of language. They are letter driven environments in which visitors may wipe their minds clean of thoughts and ideas. A word fragment is stuck inside the space and on the tip of the tongue, as a reverberating vowel or consonant heard, or perhaps envisioned through an endless mental mirroring. I put my head back and clearly see the sound fragment repeating itself towards the horizons, defying its own sound space and pushing aside the mind’s attempts to string together the habit of thought.

Much as how the kiki bouba experiment established the universal link between sound and form in the development of language (kiki corresponding to a sharp, angular form, and bouba corresponding to a soft, undulating form) we have an opportunity in the architecture of a letter to feel its inner contours. Not just in our throat and tongue, but as edges, surfaces and corners to our sense of touch, iterated sounds that enter our ears, and the synesthetic color that reverberates within that sound impression.

Walls Have Ears, 2020

With voices by Yi-Ping and Tara Riddell

Installation (Steps, walls,slope, sound)

Variable dimensions.

Installation (architectural construction, sound, light)

Collaboration with Povilas Marozas (Studio SpaceTime)

With production support from the CAC Vilnius.

A move from paranoia to shared intelligence, or in other words: consciousness is already embedded in everything and it’s a matter of us building subtle enough sensors to transcribe it.

The collaboration is inspired by Dr. Miss Velma Jaggers who had the floor slightly rise upon entering her church so that you’d feel heavy and tired without realising why. The ramp was flanked by her twelve disciples dressed in biblical style lurex robes and turbans speaking in intuitive tongues.

Photos courtesy of Andrej Vasilenko, Povilas Marozas and Marcos Lutyens