︎

“But most of all, I think you have to try to evoke the sound in the space.  That’s the crux of this essay/site. “ 11 








11 
I have resisted this prompt 
(a) Because I maintain that I was/am not sure that it is entirely necessary
(b) Because it is admittedly very difficult

With every moment the installation is activated, the boundaries of the museum decompose. If I were to hold a recording of the atrium’s sounds with no visual feed, who would know who is the artist? The authority? The focus? The empirically correct? The answer is that within this installation, this portion of the museum, there is no such thing. The sound, the phenomena, the space is all collectively a mutually participatory hypertext. 

I did not video document my experience in the space in any way, and I am now months removed from the phenomena. I believed this to be an inherent barrier to recounting my perception of the installation’s sound, especially because the MoMA has for some reason chosen to take great care in carefully documenting every element of the installation explicitly sans audio. 

Yet upon some reflection, I know realize that memory is indeed the last essential participant in Pendleton’s hypermedia experiment. How do the memories we track into the space influence our memory of the space? How do our specific experiences of the space constitute the spoken, written, and living memorials to Who is Queen? Memory allows the installation to resist even deinstallation - the museum is the work’s crucial infrastructural platform, but it does not grant the work permanence or finality.  

Thus, 
the sounds that I remember most are not the sounds from the video.You hear the video art from the adjacent gallery. The crowd muttering. The child yelling. Steps ascending the staircase. The line waiting to enter. Individual attempts to decipher the texts. Docents historicizing. We stare and we stare and we stare at the paintings. We listen to the sound and try to keep track of its progressions. We try to tune out the screaming child. We try to ignore the sounds of the chattering line. Yet I can’t! I accept defeat, I am impotent in my attempts to streamline either an audio or visual experience, and so I wade through the collected noise. But what is defeat in this context if not an agreement to a mutual relationship. An implicit rejection of linear historicization akin to violence.




︎