Thick Air, 2023

Plan of the exhibition room. Tactile transducers on one wall, driven by an amplifier and a laptop in the room next door, make the wall shake. Sound collects along the sides and in the corners, with relative silence in the middle. — Thick Air, 2023, installation diagram

The work is an empty exhibition space with two big tactile transducers attached to the backside of one of the walls. These transducers are playing the lowest resonant frequency of the wall they’re attached to, making the wall vibrate at 27 Hz. The sound is a sub-bass so deep that it is felt as air pressure rather than heard as sound.

The room is in a state of disequilibrium. Silence in the middle and pressurized air on the sides.

Within five minutes during its initial presentation, two people left the room due to rising anxiety or nausea. The remaining audience continued to experience the work. Interestingly, some were affected positively and compared the experience to a calming massage.