Delayed presence: Micro-tuning of space

Time machines are frequently associated with movie-like time travelling such as in H.G. Wells's novel. But it is rather sound and music that allow for the most flexible and dynamic time travelling: a kind of uchronia rather than utopia. Musical performance is a time machine that allows for time axis manipulation on the time-critical micro level, such as with electroacoustic delay lines or electromagnetic tape delay in early electronic music studios. These enabled phase shifting and superposition of sound events.

From the microsonic field of samples up to the macrosonic domain of musical composition, sound can be sculpted in time. Jacob Kirkegaard's audio-visual installation AION acoustically unfolded the abandoned space inside the forbidden zone of the collapsed nuclear plant of Chernobyl in Ukraine. In each of the abandoned rooms, Kirkegaard made a recording of ten minutes that he played back into the same room, recording the playback and repeating these steps up to ten times. As the layers got denser, each room slowly began to unfold a drone with various overtones. Kirkegaard's sonic time layering explicitly refers back to Alvin Lucier's installation I am sitting in a Room (1969) where the technical set-up created a tempor(e)ality of its own. A microphone positioned in a room catches Lucier's articulations played from magnetic tape together with the noise as generated in the room and feeds it into a tape recorder. When the recording is amplified and played back into the same room to be recorded again, the time-delayed sound loops result in increasing acoustic entropy. This setting transforms sound into a chrono-poetic event, with the real chrono-poet being the tape recorder itself.

In architecture, this corresponds with reverberative time (the audio signal delay known as ‘echo’). Even the digital manipulation of audio-visual echoes generated in architectural or bodily space keep an indexical relation to their origin; this is what lets human understanding ‘feel like an enigmatic causality’ (Ksenija Čerče). In the case of ancient and medieval churches, ‘there is no mention of intentionally creating reverberation for its theological relevance’; long reverberation as created in huge cathedrals does not as such correspond with the Pythagorean epistemology of harmony, which is based on integer numbers that are infinitesimally broken by acoustic delay time.