In Don Ihde’s phenomenology of sound, the percipient apprehends space by listening within it. Hearing one object in Eastern State Penitentiary’s cells strike another object revealed the shapes of both, their textures and compositions, the incidents of their surfaces, the hollow or solid characters of their interiors. [248] Their sounds made the space around them tangible and alive. [249] These sounds were concretely of the cellblock, so proximate as to be indistinguishable from that environment, which they revealed to be vibrant and effervescent, iterative and in process, rather than some pile of mute and static artifacts.
Sound scanned the cellblock and penetrated its contents, including human percipients. As Jim Drobnick puts it:
Pandemonium’s sounds entered the body surreptitiously as tactile vibrations at the low end of the audible spectrum, so much so that during a rumbling
glissando Eastern State Penitentiary public programming director Sean Kelley asked himself, “Is this safe?”
[251] Similar to the way Cardiff’s
walks produce virtual
proximity with the artist’s body,
Pandemonium nurtured proximity between the percipient’s body and the environment of cellblock seven itself. It was an experience of radical closeness, not merely ‘near’ documentary but evidence of being thoroughly enmeshed.
[252] Pandemonium’s treble and bass beaters, like the high and low sounds of Cage’s life systems in the
anechoic chamber, sounded matter’s refusal to give up moving and interacting.
Pandemonium documented the inevitable failure of an effort like Eastern State Penitentiary to conform a sentient body to an abstract system that denies its sensuality and irreducible interdependence with the world.
Pandemonium did not limit this act of memory to the Philadelphia System’s extraordinary years of silence and isolation. Like
Words Drawn in Water,
Pandemonium argued for a
synchronic model of history, in which “. . . threads of time collide, cross and intertwine, looping back on themselves.”
[255] Its programmatic narrative ushered the listener through 1960s riots and
1970s closure then neglect. Its noise-makers were nineteenth-century bedframes, twentieth-century toilets, and, to dramatic effect, Cold War-era steel drums. Its electronic actuator (MIDI system, cords, and solenoids) injected the piece with a dystopian science fiction aesthetic that nodded also to the future. At the same time,
Pandemonium referenced its own, twenty-first-century noise culture. Its dance passages invoked the relentless, percussive techno that originated in Detroit around 1988 and warped its way through rave culture of the 1990s.
[256] Berlin had become a world center for techno as it was for sound art, presenting days-long dance parties in massive, industrial buildings scaled similarly to cellblock seven (Fig. 29). At the same time, Cardiff and Miller include Pandemonium in a suite of works -
Feedback (2004),
The Killing Machine (2007)
(video clip), and
The Murder of Crows (2008)
(video clip) - with which they tried to respond to their experiences of reality during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009).
[257] While they were conceptualizing
Pandemonium, the United States military began its “shock-and-awe” campaign in Iraq. Images of torture at Abu Ghraib circulated in the news media. Reports emerged, just after
Pandemonium opened, of the Israeli air force deploying “sound bombs” in the Gaza Strip.
[258] Pandemonium loaned shared space to this full range of noisy associations, signifying fear and pleasure, magnetizing arousal and violent aggression, ruthless domination and raucous insubordination, spiraling chaos and systematic discipline. It heightened percipients’ awareness of their own sentient bodies in relation to a panopticon, symbol
par excellence of the body’s modern subjugation.
[259] It affirmed the body’s defiant relationality, its sensual, ecological interdependence and filled the space with audible allusions to reality’s conflicted forces. It seemed to suggest that the history of Eastern State Penitentiary was neither remote nor resolved and delineated no single future for sensory relations. Inducing a charged, physical state, it invited the percipient to reflect, perhaps even to act, on her capacity to feel and to congregate. It made a compelling case that our bodies remained as entangled with systems of power in 2005 as they were in 1829 and that this condition could elicit, then as now, a spiraling array of potential responses. To make its case,
Pandemonium harnessed sonic force, propelled by an onslaught of references to the defiantly meaningful and affective noises used both from the outside in to regiment bodies and from the inside out to motivate their transgression of systems that would deny their sensual interdependence.
Pandemonium took an unequivocal stand against false claims that sounding bodies could be fixed, noises neutralized. Whether it spurred so active and pointed a corporeal meditation depended on the individual but, for all who witnessed it,
Pandemonium droned on, loop after loop, sounding its ecstatic protest.
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