REVOX – A TALE OF PHANTOMS

A performance without a live performer

a film noir for the ears within a light and sound installation

The spectators settle in and put on a set of headphones. Soon they hear a voice, a narrator.

She seems to be speaking from behind the audience. If you turn around, you can see a table with a microphone, a lit desk lamp, a bottle of water and a glass, and the core of an apple precisely where you locate her voice…. But there’s no body to be seen.

Soon this narrator begins to recount the story of Paul Stiller, the famous audio engineer of the last century who reigned over the world of cinematic sound production for nearly fifty years.

One evening, while religiously listening to one of his old recordings, he comes across a curious instant of silence. Fascinated, he begins to dig through his archives and listen to all of his tapes in the hopes of discovering the same phenomenon. And not only does he succeed, he also discovers fragments of his wife’s voice, a voice he hasn’t heard since her mysterious disappearance 30 years ago.

Suddenly the set comes to life. The watch starts ticking, the phone rings, the rocking chair quivers. The narrator gets up and walks on stage. We follow her footsteps; she walks across the living room set, sits on the sofa and lights a lamp. The spectators follow her movements precisely – but there still is no one to be seen. Is she a ghost? Or could she be Stiller’s final masterpiece? Had he accomplished a frankensteinian feat, giving life to a being which only exists acoustically? Who is she, what has she done with Stiller, and who’s sitting in the rocking chair?
“REVOX – A Tale of Phantoms” experiments with the hyper-realistic quality of binaural microphones, building acoustic illusions and playing with our auditory perception.