Kevin Beasley

Entering the room with the glass box that holds the cotton gin is a very impactful sight. It’s a massive industrial machine taken out of the context of a factory and put into the new context of an art museum. I expected there to be a lot more noise, at first I thought the machine wasn’t even on. I was confused before reading the description what was going on with the mics and what their purpose was. Once I entered the room adjacent I realized what was happening. Both rooms people barely talked but in the room with the sounds and vibrating chairs even if someone did talk you couldn’t hear them. The sounds of the deep inner workings of this machine was a very enjoyable experience for me. It never crossed my mind to think about the smaller sounds that a machines. Closing my eyes in the darker room with speakers I was able to imagine myself in the machine and think about the origin of the noises from what mic was picking up the sounds. My inner world brought me into a the machine that I saw into the other room. I was able to take that memory and freely assign the sounds to what I thought made sense to me.

At one point while sitting down with my friends sarah an older gentleman sat next to us and started a conversation about the piece, we all compared our reactions and feelings towards this exploration of sound and vibration and then he got up and went on his way.  The vibrating chairs really bring the sounds to life, I started to feel the sounds more than hear them and that brought this whole experience to a new dimension of understanding an experience such as sound. People in the space did whatever they wanted to do which I thought was lovely because the experience of this space was less limited, I think instructions or any other sort of creative intervention would perhaps mess up the natural flow of how everyone experienced the piece. That’s just an opinion though maybe there could be different elements put in that could bring the piece to another level but I enjoyed it the way It was.