Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Late Afternoon


Late afternoon is when the electronic noises start. The sounds of an electric train accelerating and leaving the station, the sounds of an engine shifting into high gear, the beeping of a garbage truck when it is backing up. The sounds of a hydraulic lifting mechanism. The beeping of a microwave oven, but very, very loud.
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TA: Can you make those noises any softer please?
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EA: No, I can't. That is the the volume that the machine creates. It can not be turned down.
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TA: Oh.
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The electronic noises have been around since he was three. Later that year came the robotic voice: the voice that sounds as if it is a recorded message being spoken through a faulty static-filled public address system. Flat monotone, metallic sounding but still vocal, it is not a robot voice as much as a recorded anouncement, stated clearly and slowly. It usually begins with "May I have your attention please. All passengers..." and always ends with the words "Thank You" stated through the static.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed seeing the Thomas Kinklade picture in a strange kind of way, but this is great. I love this for the light, the bottles, the gaze, the body and the cold domesticity mixed with something alien and fixed in space (as in the final frontier).

And I can empathasise with the electronic noises!

Darrell Eager said...

Remember painting with light? Not the Thomas Kinkade kind, the Arron Jones kind. Thats what I thought of after looking at Snow White and then at the flashlight shot. I wonder what he's doing right now?

Anonymous said...

This series never disappoints. An equation of shapes and light that I imagine makes more sense to him, I'm left to just enjoy the magic. The imagined sounds only add another layer of complexity.

Timothy Archibald said...

Thank you all for writing. I think I like this shot as well, though I can't really figure out what expression is right and what it means really. But it looks interesting and seems to fit in with the project.

I got lucky this past weekend and got to sit in on a dialogue between two fiction writers who were discussing the power of "point of view" in writing. Whom is doing the talking? Whose eyes are we seeing the world thru?
Who are we giving a voice to? This stuff got me thinking, because I want to get ahold of the way to deal with text for this project, be it a book, an exhibit or a web site. Others have felt, and I've agreed, that I need text of some sort. This short paragraph had this kind of everyday-ness to it that I would like to tap into again.

Darrell Eager said...

I never said I liked this shot. I do, but I never said so.
I think the most interesting aspect of this shot in particular is that I no longer see a young boy but the emergence of a young man. Timothy if I was you I would be shaking right now. The robots voice will start cracking soon.

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