Rish Rush // רִשְׁרוּשׁ
Sound Installation (3 stereo audio tracks)
2019
“Listening offers another point of view, an alternative perspective on how things are, producing new ideas on how they could be… and how we could include sound’s invisible formlessness in a current realization and valuation of what we understand to be the actual world.” [Salome Voegelin - Sonic Possible Worlds, 2014]
How can invisible formless sound be represented by a human voice and transformed into a tangible form like a word in a language? What kind of sonoric experience is created when we listen to a foreign language, where the words are neutralized from their meaning? How can a change in an environment affect our listening practices and the way we experience and vocalize sounds?
RishRush (=the Hebrew onomatopoeia word for “the rustling of leaves”) is a voice-sound triptych that travels around a multi-lingual onomatopoeic space, loosening the connection between word and its meaning or between a sound and its function in an agreed sign system; it is a recollection of the initial reverberation of things into a language; an invitation to examine the formation of shapeless sound into a material and to gaze upon the fragile tension that exists between the actual vocal expression and its object: all the sounds in the world, including the silence.
The illustration was made by artist Iris Chun-Tzu Chang: “Listening to RishRush, I imagine and transform the movement of sound into illustration, a map of where dialogues happen.”
Mastering: Marco Tarantino
Special thanks to Dafna Kron, Yoav Ronat, Yael Gaulan, Jon Gordon, LCC Sound Arts department and LCC students who were interviewed for this project.
Presented at Hundred Years Gallery (London, UK) and the Israeli Centre for Digital Art (Holon, IL).
Illustration: Iris Chun-Tzu Chang