TAO G. VRHOVEC SAMBOLEC
0.004 Hz
2020|Sound, Tapan/Tupana drum, printed matter, newspaper-style publication, trestle.
The project 0.004 Hz examines an event that originates from a dispute between Serbia and Kosovo, which for several months in 2018, almost imperceptibly affected everyday life in an area of Europe comprising 25 nations by slowing down some electrical household clocks for six minutes within that period. The project embraces this event as an opportunity to encounter and contemplate the temporal gap or delay that disrupted the (measured) flow of time itself, resulting in something that I would like to call an ecstatic interval. This interval amplifies fuzzy and unstable relations between the understanding, measurement, representation and experience of temporality, and it illuminates the invisible, involuntary and unexpected ‘shadow connectivity’ between distant people, places, cultures, political spheres and everyday life, that the continent-wide electrical power grid enables.
The publication collects mostly found fragments that are indicative of the potential in the ecstatic interval. Official announcements, news reports and interpretations of the frequency deviation are juxtaposed with articulations of the ecstatic interval across literature, art, theory, philosophy and science yielding uncanny relations and familiarities.
The installation consists of a 24-metre-long printed paper roll with a graph of the Continental European Power System mean electrical frequency deviations from January to March 2018 and sound at two frequencies – 50 Hz and 49.996 Hz – amplified by subwoofers and transducers attached to Tupana drum membrane.