STABZ was a sonic installation proposed by Juan Castrillon and Christopher Mulford and developed with other grad students and community members at Van Pelt Library on April 11th, 2016.
On Monday afternoon, ten people accessed the library and made their way to the stairwell located at the southwest side of the building.
For ten minutes, each of them was circulating, leaving and entering the place multiple times while their voices assembled and unraveled one another into a sonic texture composed of the selected excerpts of literature and music.
For ten minutes, their egocentric modes of silent-reading were unfolded and amplified by their voices in a reverberant space; thus, making audible and noticeable reader's voices and the thoughtful relations they have with texts without leaving the library.
The installation challenged the pattern of behavior inside this silent-reading institution by going beyond the prohibition of raising the voice and suggesting other ways through which participants could access knowledge when it circulates through unexpected ways.
The event invited people to create both, a zone of intensity in which knowledge and intersubjectivity collided in a place free of acoustically absorptive materials, and a point of listening where the tension between silence and cacophony was lauder.
This sonic tension transformed ephemerally the place's mode by creating an atmosphere in which our voices, sounding subjectivity in multiple languages, were simultaneously negotiating affection and intelligibility.
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