nightmare

The visitor enters the hotel room. S/he might sit down on a chair or lie down on the bed, trying to get comfortable. The room is an ordinary hotel room, except for two loudspeakers fixed in two of the room’s corners. There is no apparent sound to be heard, just a faint noise that finds its way into the visitor’s body and makes her/him feel uncomfortable.

Human hearing is limited to a frequency range between 20Hz and 20,000Hz. When we get older we hear less and less of the higher frequencies. This fact is used in a technique commonly known as „mosquito“ where high frequencies are used to repell teenagers from public places. Teenagers themselves use these frequencies as ring tones on their mobile phones in order to keep using them during class without the teacher noticing it. These ringtones go by the name mosquito ring tone.

Nightmare is an experiment testing your comfort zone at an unexpected location. It exposes one to a repellent technique, imitating the accustic violence our society imposes on (young) people that deviate from the way (public) spaces are supposed to being used.

The project was realised during the festival Intimate Spaces | On the Reality of Dreaming and the Nightmare of Reality from Sep. 26th to Sep. 28th 2014.