Ariel Aravot

Olam, is Hebrew for ‘world’, and also ‘a long time’.
It is part of my ongoing experimentation with a triangle of components - ‘I’, ‘others’ and ‘world’ - and the relationships between them through my work of art.

The installation consists of a 10/10 f’ room, with a circle of glass bowls on a red-oak platform close to the floor. A felt covered mallet hangs down, connected to a small motor and a motion sensor. When the field is interrupted, the sensor activates the motor and the mallet moves and hits the bowls, which produce sounds that fill up the whole space.
Your movement activates the installation. The sound rises and a boundless space is created. You have an immersive experience. But when you leave, it all goes back to quietness.
 
The open bowls create sounds which spread unboundedly. While the installation-space is fixed, the space by sound is time-dependent, changing with the visitors’ movement. It takes the ‘world’ component out into parallel universes or multiverses , which appeared in Borges¹ writing more than 80 years ago. “.. an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.”
I believe that sound, unsettled and dependent on visitors movements, undermine (in a playful way) the sense of stability of space-time. The double floor - the one you step on and the wooden platform, may stabilize the experiential appeal, but also increase it as groundlessness. This, following Steyerl² connects to the rejection of stable metaphysical ground and of any claims for foundational political myths, as central characteristics of the present.

1 Jorge Luis Borges: "The Garden of Forking Paths" 1941
2 Hito Steyerl / In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, e-fluxjournal#24—april2011