A space for silence: exhibiting and materialising silence through technology

Introduction

It feels strange to write an article about silence. But although some might see silence as ‘nothingness’ and while it is an understudied phenomenon, silence is actually a rich, fascinating and important subject that deserves academic study. Allow me to briefly explain how this article came into being. We were in October 2000 and I visited Expo 2000, the universal exhibition that took place in Hanover, Germany, in the year 2000. One of the national pavilions that I visit is the Norwegian one, the content of which really struck me. While most pavilions at Expo 2000 contained objects or movies about nature, technology and humankind, which was the general theme of the whole exhibition, the Norwegian pavilion displayed a very unusual object: silence. The main attraction was, in fact, an art installation named ‘The Silent Room’ created by a contemporary artist (Marianne Heske). I remember sitting down on the floor in a gigantic but totally empty room listening to strange sounds and, above all, ‘listening’ to silence. I felt refreshed and relaxed because there were so many things to see at Expo 2000, and this pavilion provided for a welcome break; I also felt curious and wondered about the meaning of this pavilion. What does it mean to exhibit silence? How can absence be made present?

There are, of course, different ways to fabricate silence, different places and events where silence is performed and different meanings that silence has in each of these areas. We encounter silence in politics, in religion, in music, in language, in the legal domain and in art. ¹ Silence is, in fact, a polysemic notion, and there are cultural, political and architectural differences between these different kinds of silence.

Some, for example, speak of the ‘politics of forgetting, silences and erasure’, ² that is, the practice of remaining silent on certain issues in order to forget them or leave them unspoken. ³ On the other extreme of the political spectrum are, for instance, commemorative moments of silence in order to remember tragic accidents and the victims of these accidents (the politics of not-forgetting). In religious settings, such as cloisters or abbeys, silence is also a common feature, which can make it especially difficult for researchers to investigate social interactions therein. ⁴ In such spaces, silence is commonly seen as a means to establish closer contact with the divine.

In music, on the other hand, silence refers to non-action:

when silence is noted down on a partition, the musician does not play. [ . . . ] ‘Silences’ are indeed a time of breathing, of memory and resonance [ . . . ] They are often described as punctuation: cuts in time, moments of ongoing spikes in the continuous flow of music, the essence of movement, of rhythm. Music is the art of negotiating these malleable ‘silences’. ⁵

Interestingly, the notation used in music to depict silence is called a ‘rest’ – a visual representation of silence on a sheet of paper, but a rather active presence in the sense that it constructs rhythm, that it is an instruction not to play any note or that it might even leave room for improvisation. Reggae and dub music, a musical style where rests or silences are particularly common and important, are described as follows: ‘the structure of [dub] music is about things dropping out and coming back in’; it is marked by the ‘embrace of negative sonic space (silence, absence) as a positive musical value’. ⁶

But most research on silence stems from within domains such as communication, socio-linguistics and discourse analysis. ⁷ The intrinsic relationship between speech and silence is often explained: ‘Speech involves the controlled use of silence and silence can only exist as an absence of what is recognized as sound’. ⁸ More so,

Silence is not the absence of speech, when viewed from a phenomenological perspective, but potentially the presence of that which is either unrecognised or non-representational. [ . . . ] What we may not speak of, or not know how to speak of, is as powerful as how we perceive we may speak. The phenomenology of speech incorporates a phenomenology of silence as its correlate. ⁹

In the academic literature, the Nordic regions in Europe are typically described as relatively ‘quiet’, that is, countries such as Estonia, Norway, Finland and Sweden are usually characterised as ‘silent’ nations and as ‘less talkative’ than other nations. ¹⁰ The cultures of these countries are portrayed as ‘quiet and valuing silence’ and ‘among the most individualistic’. ¹¹ Yet, across countries, silence can perform different roles. For instance, ‘Nordic silence means retirement to solitude and non-communication, which makes it different from the kind of silence that is typical of Japan, Korea, and China’. ¹² What is more, some authors have argued that there are even differences between Finnish silence and Swedish silence. ¹³ At times, then, the idiosyncrasy of a national silence might be highlighted: ‘There is no silence like a Norwegian silence!’. ¹⁴

While all these versions of silence have a particular significance and are interesting, often under-researched, topics, in this article, I focus on a different kind of silence: an artistic silence that is explicitly called and performed as such; a silence that is produced by a range of technologies; a silence that is assembled and performed through a complex interplay of various actors. It is a silence that comes in different guises – technological, material, bodily and architectural.

This article, then, holds that silence can be turned into an object worthy of academic analysis. I engage with silence through different lenses. Above all, I will focus on the spatiality and materiality of silence. I will look at the space in which it is performed, the materialities involved in building the Silent Room and producing the silence therein. I will, in particular, examine the different kinds of technologies used in this process and, in doing so, shed light on the different kinds of engagements with technology at work. Before the conclusion, I look at how some visitors experienced the Silent Room. The material I draw upon was collected through 20 semi-structured interviews, ¹⁵ e-mail conversations with 3 guides and 5 visitors of the pavilion and an analysis of written material (press articles, brochures and websites about the pavilion).

The remainder of this introduction sets out my theoretical framework. I start with a discussion about space and then look at theorisations of (the making present of) absence. The Norwegian pavilion, as indeed any pavilion at a universal exhibition, is a construction that produces space. In his book The Production of Space, Lefebvre argues that space is first of all heard and enacted. ¹⁶ He further argues that space is a set of relations and forms: ‘space contains a great diversity of objects, both natural and social, including the networks and pathways which facilitate the exchange of material things and information. Such “objects” are thus not only things but also relations’. ¹⁷ Silence, I argue in this article, can also be such an object we can find in space, a spatial object. The Silent Room was, in fact, a space that produced, contained and displayed silence; a space filled with silence.

A national pavilion, as indeed any building, is the result of heterogeneous design; because the ‘interests of powerful voices in the design process are etched into the artefact itself, [ . . . ] the design of machines or buildings is heterogeneous – at once, the planning of material things and social interests’. ¹⁸ The concept of heterogeneous design helps to explore how buildings assume the form that they have. As we will see later, the Norwegian pavilion can be understood as the result of heterogeneous design involving a multitude of (human and non-human) actors: an artist, architects, acoustic consultants, sponsors and the Norwegian state. Importantly, two mutually exclusive entities – silence and sound – had to be designed side by side.

Silence – that is, the manifest absence of sound – occupied a very distinct place in this assemblage. Thus, let me say some words on absence. First of all, absence is not simply absent. Indeed, absence can have some kind of presence. John Law has distinguished between two versions of absence: manifest absence (what presence acknowledges and makes manifest; absence which is absent but explicit) and Otherness (absence that is not acknowledged and that cannot be brought to presence). Law further writes, ‘Manifest absence goes with presence. It is one of its correlates since presence is incomplete and depends on absence’. ¹⁹ Seen in this way, the Norwegian pavilion is a place where silence is performed, made present as a ‘manifest absence’.

As we will see throughout this article, the most distinctive features of the Norwegian pavilion at Expo 2000 were a simultaneous presence and absence (of nature, of sound, etc.). Therefore, we have to move from Lefebvre’s theorisations of space to more recent work on space, in particular to understandings of space in relation to both presence and absence. ²⁰ To put it this way: the Norwegian pavilion at Expo 2000 is a space that contains both presences and absences. These absences have their place and leave their trace in space. Hetherington has further argued, ‘The absent has a geography – a surrounding that implies both presence and present’, ²¹ as has Maddrell, who talks about ‘cultural geographies of absence’. ²² This is, in effect, what I will aim to do in this article: to provide a thick description of the geography of one particular silence, to write a ‘sizeable’ account of something that we usually see as non-spatial and empty. Thus, this article aims to contribute to recent debates about the geography and materiality of absence ²³ by focussing on such an instance in which the absent is made present. Rather than seeing absence and presence as two separate entities, I am concerned with what I have termed elsewhere ‘the relational ontology of absence’ and the necessary and dialogic relation between absence (silence) and presence (sound). ²⁴ This article wants to further reflect on the cultural geographies of absence: by concentrating on silence as one particular example of absence; by focussing on the various techniques and mediations that enable the ‘production’ of silence or absence; and by providing an analysis of the geography of (one) silence, that is, the way in which silence exists in space and how it is materialised, textured and experienced in a particular space. Like music making, ²⁵ silence ‘takes place’.

An article and an art installation about silence cannot escape being compared to the piece 4′33″ composed by artist John Cage (1912–1992) – probably the most famous silence in art. ²⁶ Most interpretations see 4′33″ as a piece that does not consist of silence but of ambient sounds which naturally occur within the environment and among the audience. ²⁷ There are, on one hand, key differences between Cage’s 4′33″ and the Silent Room: the former, a musical piece, is about the impossibility of silence; the latter, an art installation, is concerned with the possibility of silence. While the former conflicted with expectations about concerts (hearing music), the latter conflicted with expectations about what to encounter in exhibitions more generally (seeing objects or displays). The meanings of these silences were different, they were differently performed and they existed differently in space. Yet, there are a number of similarities as well. Both silences were made. Both silences were produced deliberately as art performances with the help of several technological devices. Importantly, both silences were produced in space and as space. Thus, both silences need to be understood as arrangements in space (including their locations, publics, textures and walls) because these arrangements were also constitutive of space, that is, they also produced the very particular spatial experience through which silence was made explicit and could be ‘listened to’. To put it this way, space and silence co-produce each other.

The remainder of this article is divided into three parts. The next part provides a description of the building and architecture of the pavilion. Here, I describe the main actors, ideas and the artist involved in the project. The section after that focuses on the technologies used to produce the Silent Room and the particular relationship with technology. The final section exposes some of the visitors’ experiences of the Silent Room and the need for the guides to modify their explanations to better prepare the visitors to experience silence.

Building the Norwegian pavilion at Expo 2000

The motto of Expo 2000, ‘Humankind-Nature-Technology’, was set out as a guiding concept for the whole exhibition. The organisers chose it to assure ‘a new awareness leading to harmony of humankind, nature and technology, which causes concerns and needs a rethinking’. ²⁸ But as a critic said, the motto was a formula without content. ²⁹ Nonetheless, this ideological banner was set, and each country had to submit a proposal that was then assessed in Hanover to ensure the focus on the theme. Altogether, 155 countries participated and 18 million visitors (most of whom paid 69 Deutsch Mark for a 1-day ticket) attended Expo 2000. Among those visitors, 1,058,708 came to visit the Norwegian pavilion. ³⁰

Norway’s participation at Expo 2000 was organised by the company ‘Norway at Expo 2000’, a company consisting of the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry and several Norwegian firms. The ministry, together with nine shareholders, financed and coordinated the construction of the pavilion. These shareholders were as follows: a company supplying energy and material such as aluminium, a Scandinavian industrial group supplying wooden products, a Norwegian group producing hydropower and other renewable energies, an oil company, a company manufacturing polymer particles, a Norwegian telecommunication group, the Norwegian Tourist Board and two cruise ferry lines. Apart from these shareholders, numerous other persons were involved in the design and construction of the pavilion: architects, designers, consultants, various suppliers and an artist.

In order to design the pavilion, the architects worked in close collaboration with several consulting firms. One firm, for instance, was involved in supervising the construction according to building regulations, while another firm was involved in room acoustics. The original architectural project was a collaboration between an architecture office and Norwegian artist Marianne Heske (more on this artist below). The construction was going to be an open construction containing five art installations, an IMAX cinema and so on. However, after consultation with a film and theatre director (Bentein Baardson), this project was given up. The influential director – who had previously worked for the opening of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer – presented a concept with a waterfall and silence as the two main attractions for Expo 2000. The largest space of the exhibition was going to be a single art installation produced by Marianne Heske. The construction of the pavilion began in September 1999 and was completed in May 2000.

Heske is considered as one of the most important contemporary artists in Norway. Project Gjerdeløa is her most famous work, ‘her signature’ so to say (interview with curator). This project consisted in moving to Paris a 200-year-old Gjerdeløa house (a løe is a small wooden house for pressing grass), ‘the most Norwegian thing you can imagine from up in the mountains’. For Heske, it symbolises the old days, a time when people managed natural resources and a different balance prevailed between humankind and nature. ³¹ She transported the small house to the Pompidou Centre in Paris. ‘I was carrying a place of the tranquillity and calmness of the mountain in my luggage’, she explained. ³² Her aim was that peaceful silence and harmonic contemplation should reach the visitor of the exhibition (the 11th Biennale of Paris in 1980) – not only as an idea or concept but also as a concrete experience. ³³ This project has a lot in common with the Silent Room at Expo 2000: silence was a key theme in both art works, as was the reference to centre-periphery debates.

During her career, Heske has handled a number of large-scale projects, and her strong relationship with Norwegian nature and the constant use of technology in her art was closely connected to the theme of Expo 2000 (‘Humankind-Nature-Technology’). She was depicted, therefore, as a logical choice for the Norwegian participation at Expo 2000. On one hand, the organisers wanted to ‘leave the artist alone with her work’, and on the other hand, they said having ‘used’ her to create an ‘intellectual approach’ to promote Norway (interview with the general commissioner of the pavilion). The artistic consultant of the pavilion further commented that Heske’s art became ‘political in the fact that it is selling a nation, [it’s] politics by other means’.

Producing silence, using technology

Having described the building of the pavilion, let us now turn to its main attractions: the waterfall and the Silent Room. The first part of the ‘Aggregate’, the waterfall, was constructed full-scale in Norway in order to be ‘tested’, before it was taken apart and sent to Hanover. It was 15 m high and 1.5 million litres of water per hour rushed down. The waterfall was generated by four water pumps that collected water out of a basin in front of the pavilion. Through four pipes, this water was pumped to the top of the pavilion, into a small basin. Finally, the water rushed down again, through a construction in the front facade (see Figure 1). The whole system produced a roar of some 80–90 decibels.

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Figure 1.

Front facade of the pavilion with the waterfall (photo by J.-H. Janßen, Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Licence).

Different narratives have been given about the waterfall. ‘The original’, the Steindalsfossen, a famous tourist destination in Norway, measures 50 m. Consequently, it was often referred to as ‘the copy’ of the original. Others described the waterfall as being ‘inspired by’ Steindalsfossen or being a ‘model’, a ‘piece of Norwegian nature’. Others, still, said that Heske had ‘taken Norwegian nature to Germany’.

So what, then, were the main accounts about this waterfall? For some, it was an eye-catcher and a never-ending sound-coulisse – a ‘roaring’ portal leading from a noisy world into the ‘cosmic’ silence behind the masses of water. ³⁸ For others, the roaring power of the waterfall was meant to reflect nature, a Norwegian tourist attraction. Accounts include ‘dramatic’, ‘thundering’, ‘rumbling’ and so on. ³⁹ One comment held that Heske ‘lured’ the visitors with the waterfall and I have been told that one couple even got married underneath it. ⁴⁰ In sum, the waterfall had two main meanings. First, it was built to represent a piece of Norwegian nature. Second, it was to be a portal, making the silence in the Silent Room possible by displaying the opposite of silence (sound), thus part and parcel of the Silent Room itself. Whatever the visitors of the Norwegian pavilion made of the waterfall, they could not escape it since the main access to the Silent Room was a door behind this waterfall.

The Silent Room, then, consisted of a room measuring 15 × 15 × 15 m (see Figures 2 and 3). The floor, walls and ceiling were composed of specially treated sheets of aluminium. Altogether more than 700 sheets were installed in the room. These sheets were covered by a ‘processed impression of nature’, conveyed by Marianne Heske. In effect, a slide of a video image had been enlarged 2.25 million times and joined together, so that it covered the whole room.

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Figure 2.

Inside the Silent Room, visitors tend to cluster and sit down at the edge of the room and look upwards (photo by Marianne Heske).

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Figure 3.

Inside the Silent Room, view from below, the lights and sound installation are hanging in the middle of the room (photo by Marianne Heske).

Let me now turn to the technologies that had been used to build the Silent Room. Apart from the waterfall just described, several technologies were involved: a video camera, computers, printers, a sound system, etc. First of all, Marianne Heske used a video camera (a Sony U-Matic) to ‘photograph’ nature. With this camera – a rather old model, and the only technology she herself used directly – she filmed a stone avalanche in her native village. (Heske was, in fact, a pioneer in the technique called videopainting.) Heske’s selected slide was then scanned into a computer and processed electronically before being transferred under high pressure onto aluminium. A sound installation producing sounds of falling stones was furthermore installed in the Silent Room. These sounds were, of course, disrupting the silence in the room, but at the same time, they maintained the silence. ‘This sound makes you realise the silence in a way’ (interview with architect). As an art critic puts it, ‘It is in the subsequent silence that we experience [ . . . ] silence’. ⁴¹ It is important to stress two points here. First, the significance of silence is described here in relation to something else: to sound, as a part within a sequence of auditory events, as part of architecture. In other words, the relationality of silence becomes apparent. Second, Heske’s way to represent ‘nature’ and ‘silence’ is very much dependent on a wide array of technologies, expertise, programmes and engineers. So let us further examine how this highly technologised silence was ‘processed’.

When designing the Silent Room, the architects were closely working with acoustic consultants. Some of the aluminium panels in the Silent Room were perforated in order to diminish reverberation time. About 60 per cent of the panels were perforated to make the sound of the falling rocks as ‘natural’ as possible. In addition to this, isolating material was chosen to reduce the sound of the waterfall (which the acoustic consultants measured when it was tested in Norway) and sound from (expected) cars next to the exhibition site. Interestingly, during our interview, the acoustic consultants explained to me that for them, ‘Silence is [ . . . ] less than 25 decibels’. Silence was not conceived as the absence of sound but less than a certain amount of sound. The models, mathematical formulas and materials they used were similar to those used for other ‘silent rooms’ such as libraries, they explained to me. Silence, for acoustic consultants, is, thus, something that can be engineered and mathematically modelled; something that can be measured, calculated and quantified. And, interestingly, the technologies used by Heske and the consultants were technologies that produced silence by shielding it from technological noise outside of the pavilion (the noise stemming from the pumps of the waterfall and of cars).

Heske’s relationship with technology deserves further attention here. Her use of technology has not that much to do with the way these technologies are commonly used, but we see a quite philosophical and playful relationship. She explains,

I transfer this image to metal plates via laser and computer. Then I burn it at very high temperature, which makes it very strong. It’s cold, warm, cold, warm. I like this feeling of temperature, radiation, movement, besides the visual thing.

Furthermore, some features of technology, such as the pixels of an image, normally seen as a limit of technology, acquire a positive meaning. Heske’s use of technology is seen as a means to create a certain ‘mystical presence’. ⁴² The ‘definition of her own visual reality’ is explained as being a ‘highly personalized image born out of the inner fusion of electronic technology and of life experience’. ⁴³ As an art critic notes, Heske’s technological enlargement and digital decoding usually creates a ‘distance’ to the original. ⁴⁴ At the same time as drawing the technological and the social together (creating a ‘fusion’ of technology and life experience), detachment occurs. Heske’s metaphorical depiction of nature creates a distance between the signifier present in the pavilion and the signified present in Norwegian nature. But this distance, as we will see in the section below, also makes it difficult for visitors not familiar with the significance and experience of silence in Norway to understand the Silent Room. This distance and tension – between a signified ‘natural’ silence and its cultural, technological, artistic (re)production and performance – is perhaps best captured by the following quote: ‘Silence is a product that Norway is amply supplied with’. ⁴⁵

This might seem, at first sight, a nonsensical statement. Is Norway really supplied with or does is actually contain a ‘product’ called silence? Yet, the silence present in the Silent Room was undeniably something culturally and technologically mediated – a product, in other words. It is worth stressing this point: that silence can be something produced. We must consider here the necessary – and dialogic – relationship between silence and sound, a relationship that resonates with the distinction between ground and figure. In linguistic analysis, the common argument is that an auditory figure such as a word or a tune ‘stands out from its ground – which we usually call silence’ and, in the same way, a ‘visual figure tends to be more complete and coherent and [ . . . ] better defined, than the ground against which it is seen, which is perceived as less distinct [ . . . ]’. ⁴⁶ In a written text such as this one, if we reverse figure and ground, the result is an odd blank, an empty space that looks erroneous and that hits the eye immediately: In the Silent Room, the functions of ground and figure are inversed: silence is the figure and sound is the ground. This reversal is much more radical than a mere change of musical ‘scale’ – a change which does not change the nature or tonality of notes but instead changes the relationships between them ⁴⁷ – as it is the relationship between, as well as the tonality of, silence and sound which are changed. Silence and sound, figure and ground, are necessarily related; they cannot exist one without the other. One comment about the pavilion well made a direct link between the two by referring to a ‘thundering silence’. ⁴⁸ Hence, while technology produces the ground, it simultaneously enables the figure. By producing sound, technology allows silence to be perceptible, meaningful and, above all, to be present. To put it this way: the production of sound creates the possibility of silence. In effect, then, the Silent Room was a socio-technological assemblage that produced silence.

Having said that, the ways in which technologies were used to produce silence need further scrutiny. First, there is evidence of a continuous use of technology to maintain silence, such as the isolating material to keep noise in the pavilion below 25 decibels. Second, there is also a discontinuous use of technology to create the sound, namely, the sound installation. In this latter case, I want to argue, we need another term to describe the intimate relationship between technology and the production of silence. I would suggest that silence itself was produced by a significant non-use of technology. I borrow the term ‘significant non-use’ from Edgar and Clifton who use it in their analysis of silence in music. ‘A musically significant silence occurs’, Edgar explains, ‘when not all of the instruments or voices are being used’. ⁴⁹ For example, a pause might surprise listeners and ‘sound like an insert or parenthesis’. ⁵⁰ A significant non-use is a voluntary break; it means knowing how to use, being able to use but eventually deciding not to use. When Marianne Heske designed the sounds of the falling rocks together with a Norwegian musician, she was encoding a significant non-use into the sound installation. She decided that there would be intervals and pauses between the sounds. Silence in the Silent Room was produced by multiple, but co-existent, forms of technological mediation: use and significant non-use and continuous and discontinuous use.

Experiencing silence

Before Expo 2000 opened its doors to the public, Heske said, ‘What is now going to be exciting is to see how the public uses the room’. ⁵¹ So, how did the visitors experience the Silent Room? The reactions I have compiled in this section are by no means representative. I have collected responses through one face-to-face interview and via email communications: with three guides who worked at the Norwegian pavilion and with five people who knew these guides and who visited the pavilion (all these people were recruited through snowballing). While my purpose in this section is, therefore, not to provide a representative and in-depth analysis of the visitors’ experiences of the Silent Room, I, nevertheless, want to provide a ‘flavour’ of some of these.

Here are some reactions from the visitors:

Just beyond [the waterfall] is the entrance of the pavilion through which one enters the so-called ‘Silent Room’, in which a Norwegian artist (Marianne Heske) represents an extremely enlarged depiction of nature. Otherwise, this large space is [ . . . ] empty. However, every now and then a rattling noise can be heard, which might represent thought processes, but perhaps only to unsettle the visitors, so that the confrontation with this abstract art will intensify even more. I personally found the room at that time only schickig (rather posh). ⁵²

it is best to lay down on the floor, enjoy the silence, which is only occasionally interrupted by the pleasant sound of a stone rolling down from a mountain. Very relaxing! ⁵³

I really liked this very much. Of course, nothing ‘voluminous’, or impressive happens. One is only reminded that nowadays people are just not used anymore to silence – even though silence is so important for us and our thoughts. ⁵⁴

According to the guides, most of the visitors sat down, some lay down and others just rushed through the room. Heske admitted that she did not expect that most of the visitors would lay down in the Silent Room (interview with artist). Visitors considered the Silent Room as a ‘starting point for developing your own relationship to the nature’, as ‘a personal message for every one of us’ and that it was a piece of art ‘open to many different interpretations’. While the Silent Room was open to interpretative flexibility, a personal engagement with the Silent Room came to the fore. Visitors’ reactions to the Silent Room ranged from disappointment, laughter and anger to surprise and enjoyment (email communications with the guides of the pavilion). There were visitors who did not like the room. One visitor, for example, commented that there was ‘nothing to look at, no exciting technology to be impressed by. Only a strange empty room’. Other comments included ‘Was soll das?’ (What is this supposed to be?) and

Then that quiet interior with the odd noises [ . . . ] For me as a visitor this didn’t quite work though. I queued for ages and then had my five minutes or whatever in this cool space with what felt like too many other people, so the effect didn’t quite work.

Other visitors, on the contrary, seem to have liked it, as the following quotes reveal: ‘It made me think!’ and ‘The loud sound of the falling water contrasted to the silence and the soft sound of falling stones, [it was] quite wonderful and to me very indicative of the diverse landscape in Norway’. For this latter person, silence became a means to reflect about something else (or more) than silence itself, Norwegian nature. During my own visit, I experienced the Silent Room as an interesting and intriguing room. I sat down on the floor and watched, listened and reflected. Yet, I was, and still am, puzzled and unable to say whether I really liked it or not, whether I think it was creative or not. I still feel ambiguous. It did not work for me as a prop to think about Norway or Norwegian culture and technology, yet it has been the most influential artwork for my academic work.

The Silent Room was experienced and interpreted in rather different and very personal ways. It is interesting to note that information provided by the guides of the pavilion proved to be important to shape visitors’ experience. ‘Initially’, the director of the pavilion explains,

without preparing them it turned out to be a very diverse reception from people, some people didn’t understand anything, what it was supposed to be. So we changed our attitude a little. [ . . . ] We made a sort of script that we people used [and] one of the points that came up was that if we changed the script, we also changed the results of the people’s perception. The better the expectancy, the better the result.

The better the guides explained silence, the better the visitors’ experience of it was. Hence, the guides explained to the visitors that the room they were in was called ‘The Silent Room’, an art installation by Marianne Heske. Accordingly, one visitor commented,

I didn’t like at first, but when I visited the pavilion a second time I liked it very much, in fact. I think that not being prepared for this special pavilion didn’t give you full ‘value for money’ at the first visit. But after being told and having read about the thoughts and ideas behind, the visit was much more rewarding.

Besides being given some explanations about the Silent Room, visitors were also asked to switch off their mobile phones. Thus, at the same time as providing a more explicit script of the room, the guides also tried to ‘discipline’ the visitors. Consequently, noisy and undisciplined people became undesired visitors: ‘Ohne Kleinkinder und notorische Handy-Nicht Ausschalter wirklich entspannend’ (Without little children and people who would not switch off their mobile phones: really relaxing), a comment reads. ⁵⁵

When left without explanation, some visitors found it difficult to engage with silence. This is why the guides of the pavilion had to provide some clues to the visitors for how to ‘read’ and understand the space they were in. This ‘script’ was by no means a two-dimensional text; it involved looking, listening, moving and thinking in space. ⁵⁶ The Silent Room offered a personal and embodied experience of silence in a space – something to look at and listen to while sitting, standing or laying down; something to think about and try to engage with; something that some people liked and others disliked. We find a similar relationship to space in so-called sound walks, a mix between sound art and walking, which allow for flowing, embodied, active and multi-sensory ways to experience the environment. ⁵⁷ The experience of dining ‘in the dark’ is yet another example of the ways in which the experience of space and socialising are affected by absence (of light). ⁵⁸

In the Silent Room, silence was experienced as something textured, not as spaceless nothingness. This spatial and bodily experience also explains why a user can never be fully ‘configured’, why the projected user’s space necessarily clashes with the real one: ‘[t]he user’s space is lived – not represented (or conceived). When compared with the abstract space of the experts (architects, urbanists, planners), the space of the everyday activities of users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective’. ⁵⁹

Why was it so difficult for visitors to engage with silence in the Silent Room? Although this question is not easy to answer, some points (even if tentative) can be made. The difficulty to recognise, value and engage with silence has to do, I would argue, with its peculiar ontological status as an ‘object’ and the unconventional way it is performed. The difficulty to engage with silence can be contrasted here to music, ‘the most immediate and apparently unmediated cultural media’: ‘In the act of musical performance, sounds appear to speak to us directly, without the translations of formal written and idiographic symbolic languages’. ⁶⁰ In the Silent Room, in contrast, the chief object of interest was a rather ‘indirect’ object in the sense that the significance and the experience of silence was not available at hand but had to be mediated, translated, explained and made ‘experienceable’. We could also argue that it is the complex and multilayered geographies of silence that make it such an intriguing and elusive object. The visitors’ and guides’ narratives locate silence in a variety of places: as a cultural specificity and a natural quality of a country, as something to experience in the Silent Room, as something to experience with one’s body and as something that leaves room for personal reflections and thoughts. Absence is always experienced by human bodies. It is experienced in an embodied and corporal way and, as such, can be unsettling, intriguing, relaxing, extraordinary and so on. ⁶¹ Also, the silence in the Silent Room was made manifest by being physically and discursively located next to sound (the waterfall outside and the sounds of the falling stones inside). It was experienced, as Merleau-Ponty has also argued, as an absence of sound followed or proceeded by sound. ⁶² Within all these narratives and experiences, the contrasts that made silence manifest and meaningful are noteworthy: silence is at once something negative (an absence) and something positive to be valued, something experienced collectively but also individually and something performed through, but also mutually exclusive of, sound. And, the difficulty to experience silence was probably further accentuated by the fact that the other pavilions at Expo 2000 contained objects or movies and that, as a consequence, visitors probably expected to see concrete objects in the Norwegian pavilion. But not only were there many concrete things to see at Expo 2000, there were also large crowds that gathered and queued and generated a certain amount of noise. The silence in the Silent Room was experienced in this larger space of noisiness that, therefore, also contributed to visitors’ experience. To turn silence into an object to be visited, to make sure that silence can be ‘heard’ is particularly hard to achieve in the context of a universal exhibition. After all, in the midst of a setting where the spaces of nationhood, of technological objects, of large and noisy crowds and of a wide array of visual and auditory stimuli come together and often compete with each other, people might not necessarily expect and understand a space devoted to silence.

Concluding remarks

Let me come back to three points developed in this article: the multiplicity of silence, the significant non-use of technology and the materiality of absence. Silence is multiple. First, there are different kinds of silence(s): Cage’s famous 4′33″ is different to Heske’s Silent Room, for instance. While the former was a demonstration of the impossibility of silence, the latter was concerned with the possibility, representation, relationality and materialisation of silence. And, even though both were silences made in space, their meaning, performance, materiality and architecture were different. (There is, of course, a difference between the ways in which silence is performed and understood by artists and how it is analysed by social scientists.) Second, silence in the Silent Room itself was multiple: it was present at various moments (i.e. sequential); it was interpreted and experienced in quite different ways; it was scripted, experienced and re-scripted. Silence is hybrid and occupies, in fact, multiple locations: outside and inside, resource and product, nature and culture and quantity and quality.

Various kinds of technology were used to create the Silent Room, and they were used in different ways. In fact, the Silent Room was produced by multiple forms of technological mediation: continuous and discontinuous usage, usage and significant non-usage. I proposed the notion of a significant non-use of technology to describe the direct relationship between technology and silence. Not only was technology used to create sound and, thereby, create the possibility of silence; the intimate relationship between silence and technology is one of deliberate or significant non-use. Apart from sound, there are, of course, other things that can be significantly non-used. A significant non-use of production technologies has a political effect: it creates a strike or protest. A significant non-use of speech can be surprising, respectful, embarrassing or disrespectful. Think, for instance, about the ‘one minute silence’ or try to maintain a 5- to 7-second break during a conversation (in most Western countries, it will always feel strange and force people to break the silence). A ‘significant non-use’ of bodily presence – the tactic of withdrawal – is an opposition in a passive sense, through refusal to become engaged. ⁶³ Silence can have both artistic and strategic values.

We see, then, that silence does things – which brings us back to the debates about the presence and performativity of absence. ⁶⁴ Hetherington, for instance, has argued that

the absent can have just as much of an effect upon relations as recognisable forms of presence can have. Social relations are preformed not only around what is there but sometimes also around the presence of what is not [ . . . ] Indeed the category of absence can have a significant presence in social relations and in material culture. ⁶⁵

Silence is not spaceless nothingness, but silence is textured. Silence can be spatially located, and it can have some kind of materiality. Silence is an object we find in space. The Silent Room was a material, technical and discursive assemblage that produced, performed, contained and displayed silence; a space filled with silence. The visitors that came to visit the Silent Room experienced silence in an embodied way – something to listen to, think about and engage with. Eventually, what (some of) the visitors probably encountered in the Silent Room was a rather ‘dominant’ silence, which is perhaps one of the reasons why so many visitors lay or sat down in the pavilion and very few dared to talk – the silence in the Silent Room felt almost ‘heavy’.

Silence, then, is not absence but a manifest absence of sound. Silence is an absence made present. In the Silent Room, silence gained a – mystical, positive, technological and cultural – presence. But in order to make silence present, silence has to be ‘realised’ in the two senses of the word: first, it has to be ‘made real’, to be accomplished and created, and second, it has to be recognised, understood and appreciated. This depended on various processes: providing scripts and ‘disciplining’ visitors; producing sound and protecting silence; creating a building that contains silence; and using technologies that maintain silence, technologising nature and naturalising technology. In doing so, the complex and multilayered geographies of silence are made explicit. Silence is at once presented as a natural feature of a country and narrated as a cultural trait of Nordic countries, experienced by visitors in the specific setting of the Silent Room and sensed in an embodied way and throughout a very personal relationship. And silence is necessarily adjacent: it is physically, discursively and temporally located next to sound and noise.