Silence

When I thought about silence, I kept coming back to what Irene said in class about silence being entangled with noise; such as our pauses between words and sentences. So I felt as though my visualization needed to convey my fascination with the concept of silence as a part of a larger whole that incorporates both silence and noise. I envisioned silence just before or after something completes a fall, the silence of the fall itself. This idea felt similar to the phrase “the quiet before the storm.” For me, this “quietness” or silence before noise was captured through a photograph of a raindrop as it rolls off the tip of a leaf. Ultimately the drop will break its fall to create both sound and movement but the moments before that plop into the water and subsequent ripple effect seem silent to me. This is especially true in photographs, which can capture moments and extend them, making them appear clear and motionless. The capture itself is a kind of silencing, because whatever was in motion will stay forever poised, locked in the silence occurring before the drop. A person who looks at a photograph sees the frozen moment and anything else they see or hear is imagined and shaped by their own interpretation and expectations of that moment.

To reach the state of absolute silence is hard. The reason I choose this picture is to represent the place where I think I might find certain level of silence. Every object, whether it's living or not, has its own way of exsiting in this world and makes its sound in its own frequency. The world we are living is composed of the music made by all objects around us. Their existences don't depend on our achknowledgement. However, it is said that once you reach the deeper depth of sea, you will experience deadly silence. I still doubt whether it's absolute silence. If we can't hear it, does it mean that the silence finally takes place.  

The image is my bedroom.  I chose this photo because it's intuitively devoid of sound because it's devoid of people.  Even to me, someone who talks in there incessantly, knows that the sound of the upstair's cat's footsteps are thumpering from the ceiling, and just knows this space intimately.  It's always interesting how we tend to associate sounds with people--especially in more man-made constructions and constructs.

In regards to yesterday's conversation, I find more solace and comfort in silence.  This picture of my bedroom makes me wish I was home and alone. 

To depict a visualization of silence, I chose Hannah Hoch's Bouquet of Eyes.  It is a work that uses disparate elements to create something unsettling but also beautiful.  Like Hoch's work, silence is a powerfully affective experience that causes a distinct response in each individual.  It strengthens one or multiple senses, in many cases vision, but does not merely use the eye as a window through which to look but also often puts the self in the position of the object, giving time for self-reflection.  It is isolating, unifying, and can appear like one thing while simultaneously being something wholly different.

As a city girl, I'm used to constant noise. Silence, then, is something that doesn't necessarily mean an absense of noise. Silence can simply be an opportunity to pause. The image I picked comes from the album artwork for a band called Sleeping At Last. The snow reminds me of the quietest times in the city. The snow muffles sounds and hangs in the air, while city dwellers stay inside – out of sight and sound. Not only is the city audibly quieter, but – if there's enough snow – there is also a pause in activity. Students stay home from school, cars and trucks stop their deliveries of people and cargo, and shops close for the afternoon. Snowy days in the city are the only days I see people stop walking to look up and around. Something about snow encourages people to focus on something outside of themselves.