Burning Pleasure

The work Field of Action: Burning Pleasure expands the perception of forest’s soundscape, inviting the passers-by to explore the acoustic mirror installation. The elliptical acoustic mirrors use their concave surface to gather and focus sound waves (like, for example, with microphones for bird listening or TV antennas). The sound is sent directly to the ear of the visitors who need to find their point of hearing in space. Organic concave objects evoke moving across a lawn, listening to sound traces and physical orientation with which an ear can catch a manifold sound message. Forms are like shields ensuring an intimate space of listening and complete sensory attuning. The forest’s space is inhabited by soft, quiet and pleasant ASMR compositions simulating and sampling the forest sounds and a collage of ASMR voices of different YouTube narrators. In the online sphere, their pleasant whisper is an introduction into the ritual of relaxation, stress relief and meditation. Sara Salamon translates elements of this digital popular culture into voices now synchronised with other soundscapes to re-examine the expected experiences of relaxation in nature. The title Field of Action: Burning Pleasure evokes a stressful situation caused by an intense work environment and the subsequent, often idealised, process of healing in a natural environment. However, the feeling of relaxation becomes inseparable from the accompanying discreet sound irritation and discomfort. The five-channel installation radically silences sounds and thus sharpens the hearing and accentuates physical responses to the captured sound fragments. That way a multifold individual associative interweaving and a rhythmisation of the existing and sampled sounds open up. Mimicry of known sound material both disorients, blurs the boundaries of sound fields and introduces an unpredictable dynamics of listening.