Nothing Satisfies

Nothing,
Just….. Nothing,
Staring,
Nowadays people think that’s useless.
Not al lot of them take the time.

It’s very easy to live everyday life without information when it’s not at hand, but a lot of perseverance is needed to ignore it when it’s all around you. Newspapers, Cell phones, internet, commercials, etc, etc are almost impossible to avoid.
In the western society a person is regarded an outsider when he or she is not familiar with the information which is bombarded at you every moment in life.

It can be very comforting when one is surrounded with Everything to enjoy Nothing.
The beauty of small details. Silence is the Illusion. When you are in a silent environment your mind is taking over.

Nothing Satisfies

is  project of sound artist Olivier Nijs in search of emptiness in sound and location. A reaction to the overkill of sensorial information in a networked era. Seeking for tension in minimal recordings which are made mainly in natural environments where human intervention is pushed to the background so the whole spectrum of big and small sounds are available to the listener. One goal is to create a situation or opportunity in which these big and small sounds seem to interact with each other. Another important aspect of the recordings is that there will be almost no editing. The right time and place under the right weather conditions.

There was never a pre-organised plan of the sound sources present to interfere as they do during the recording process. By recording this situation these sources will melt together as a whole and become the composition in which the audience will try to find some sort of structure or aesthetic value. The chance that a bird will react to a car passing by or a farmer harvesting crops is very low. Or the other way around. This car will hardly ever react to a swarm of insects. None of the sounds present in the recordings are meant by their producers to take part in an artistic composition. They become this composition by being recorded and played back in a situation where there is a listener who sits down and listens to it. While he’s not being distracted by the visual/physical context of the origin of the sounds.

The duration and emptiness in the recordings make it possible for the listener to wander off in his or her own thoughts. Most of the time the concentration for the work seems to have some sort of waveform like cadence. The work comes and goes. A moment for reflection.

Each separate recording in the project lasts approximately one hours. This duration is derived from the authors own experience in listening. They are not meant to be listened to as a whole. When you’re ready you’re ready. They are presented to the audience as an opportunity to spend your precious time in a meaningful way, in a context where time is against you and nobody frees up time to do nothing.