Rainer Maria Rilke imagines running the needle of a phonograph along the coronal suture of a skull, an act he believes might release a primal sound, a phonographic inscription scrawled across the bones that had, until then, remained hidden and mute. The eighteenth-century German physicist, Ernst Chladni discovers
that acoustic vibrations cause patterns to form in the sand strewn across a metal plate, the delicate arabesques suggesting sound has a misunderstood materiality. Thomas Edison, slightly hard of hearing despite his young age, sits at his desk and bites down on the wooden mount supporting his prototype for a machine that can both record and play back sound. The bone structure of his teeth, jaw, and cranial cavities amplify the vibrations and restore some of the hearing that his ears no longer provide. Similarly, Ludwig van Beethoven, now all but deaf, bites into a wooden rod attached to the soundboard of his piano, accessing the tactile sonority of the instrument. Twentieth-century seismologists convert the raw data of the movement of tectonic plates into sound to better understand the power of earthquakes. The quiet shivering of the earth occasionally displays a jagged spike on a computer screen, an event that sounds like a bomb.
The senses are not discreet conduits of perception. It is almost axiomatic in Western modernity that there are but five senses, each responsible for one type of input that the others cannot decipher. But it is the very instruments and technologies of modernity that have helped to erode these apparent divisions. Synaes-
thesia is the new norm. Everything is information; how data are represented is a matter of aesthetics or convenience. Something must mediate between what is and what is perceived. Or perhaps perception is all there is. It is in the time between an event and its apprehension that wonder or terror occur.
Curated by Yan Wu