third site                                                                                              

-Running from 27 April - 18 June, 2000, at the Hayward Gallery in London, Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound brings together sound artists and musicians from all over the world in an exploration of the overlapping worlds of visual and sonic art. The show's curator David Toop writes: 'Sonic Boom scans some of the most vital artists currently working within this expanding field at a critical moment in the evolution of media... [it] offers a landscape of the imagination, transforming the perception of sound from peripheral sense or discrete spectated event to a total environment for all the senses.'

My work, third site ,was included in the show as a discrete, enclosed environment that uses projections and a remixed, 'spatialised' eight-channel version of the album. Among the other artists in the show were Paul's colleagues Thomas Köner (who provided the spoken narration for third site, and Max Eastley, as well Christian Marclay, John Oswald and Lee Ranaldo.

Taken from the Sonic Boom exhibition catalogue... 'third site is part of Schütze's ongoing project vertical memories which explores the collapsing of structures and narratives in sound and architecture, and the common ground which enables the two media such flexibility as models for the conscious mind. Vertical memories are flashes of complex recollection which bypass the usual architecture of duration common to the act of remembering and to the experience of both music and architecture.

The smell of pencils and perhaps your childhood returns, each complex sense and experience compressed into the brevity of an inhalation. Later the experience may be unravelled with language but its essence is as volatile as the smell of that pencil. Applied over time, the structures of language and formal recollection will fade and distort the experience. third site actively encourages abstractions of narrative and recall.


Using music, text and images to evoke the poetics of a built structure (architect Peter Zumthor's Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland), third site pulls the viewer into a suspended series of super imposed memories, recorded observations and conjectures. There is no proper order nor priority of detail: the relationships between its parts change through remembering.'

Paul Schütze 1999 

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