A series of landscapes showing places rumored to be haunted. The photographs will be taken in a deadpan style in broad daylight. There will be no people, and nothing whatsoever to indicate the nature of the rumors. The exhibition will consist of two identical rooms. The rooms will be sound-isolated from each other. (No sounds coming from room A will be heard from room B, and vice versa.) The photographs will be printed in identical large-format copies. One copy of each photo will hang in each room, in the same exact spot. There will be no way for a visitor to visually tell the rooms apart, if blindfolded and led into one of the rooms. In one of the rooms, there will be ambient infrasound present. In the other, there will be no ambient infrasound.
Infrasound is sound whose frequencies lie below the human ear’s ability to pick up (below 20 Hz). It is believed that certain frequencies of infrasound, in the range of 17-19 Hz, can be subconsciously picked up by the human brain and cause vague feelings of discomfort, fear, awe, feelings of being in the presence of supernatural events, and even visual hallucinations. In one case, a haunted laboratory was exorcised by turning off an extractor fan that emitted sound at around 19 Hz.
The exhibition will be double-blind.
Nov 8, 2011