//resting body//

by L. Gre

This video documents sound and visualization from //resting body//, a sculptural, site-specific sound installation that stages a tension between stillness and disintegration, care and erosion.

At its centre, a bed-shaped mound of earth (part hospital gurney, part burial plot, part altar) is subjected to an unrelenting drip from a suspended IV bag of rust-stained water. The liquid falls into a bowl of fresh water. Each drop, captured by a concealed contact microphone, is amplified into a sudden and disproportionate rupture, creating an acoustic shock against the visual quiet of the space. Over the days of the exhibition, the vessels overflow, damp seeps inward, and the once-structured earth begins to slump and collapse.

The video
The spherical visualizations, created in TouchDesigner, map the acoustic impact of each water drop as it accumulates over time. The particles of light trace individual drops, building an archive of micro-violence that the eye cannot otherwise see and that, in this excerpt, the ear cannot hear. The sounds you hear in this video are not the drips themselves, but the sonic environment that underlies and surrounds them in the installation: a low, almost imperceptible drone built from breath, murmured reassurances, and stretched body sounds. “I’m okay….I’m just a bit tired….I’m exhasuted…” The drips are absent from this soundtrack, yet their accumulated violence is what the visualizations are rendering visible. Sound and image are already haunting each other within the video itself. The drone carries the weight of impacts it does not contain, and the light traces violence that this listening cannot reach.

The process is slow, invasive, and inevitably exhausting. Each amplified drip folds into this sonic bed in the installation space, making the air flinch. Under the glare of a single light, surrounded by deep shadow, the work invites the listener to sit with the discomfort of waiting for collapse, for relief, and for nothing at all.

On gothic practice
Isabella van Elferen argues that gothic music operates through ‘spectral aurality’—sound that ‘invokes presence through absence, materialises the immaterial, and embodies the disembodied’[i] . //resting body// works within and through this logic, but extends it into the durational and the material. The amplified drops make audible the violence of care that medical discourse renders invisible; they materialise the slow attrition that institutional language euphemizes as maintenance, sustenance, life support. Each shock is spectral in Van Elferen’s sense: it makes present what structures of care systematically conceal.

The drone layer operates as what Van Elferen terms the gothic’s ‘uncanny familiar’—recognizable as human intimacy (breath, reassurance, the sounds of a body tended) yet stretched and layered until it crosses into the unheimlich, becoming a threatening proximity rather than comfort. In the video, this uncanny familiarity intensifies: the drone sounds without the violence it frames in the installation, creating an atmosphere of dread whose source has been withheld. This is not representational gothic, not the performance of gothic affect through familiar signs and symbols. It is gothic practice in the structural sense: the work enacts deterioration as lived duration, forces the viewer-listener into the slow time of dread, of watching and waiting for a collapse that is both inevitable and, here, inaudible.

Like the architectural decay of gothic fiction, //resting body// exists only through its own undoing. Care becomes the mechanism of erosion: the IV drip, culturally coded as life-sustaining intervention, operates here as slow violence. The bed-form that cannot offer rest, the maintenance that exhausts what it claims to preserve—these are the gothic’s domestic inversions made material, durational, and sonic. The amplified drop does not represent gothic intrusion; it is one, shattering the possibility of stillness in real time, making the air flinch in ways that exceed interpretation. In the video, that intrusion is visible but inaudible as its traces accumulate in light while the ear is held in the suspended dread of the drone alone.

The video and installation haunt each other across time and space. The sound you hear in this excerpt inhabits the installation room, but the violence that punctuates it there has been withheld here. Displaced, concealed, made spectral. In Van Elferen’s terms, this excerpt becomes a revenant of the physical work: carrying the trace of a body-space in which something is always about to break through, performing the gothic’s preoccupation with absence, haunting, and the violence of being kept present beyond natural duration. The two works have not yet been shown together. They are related, and they are separate. The sound moves between them as conduit and ghost present in both, complete in neither.

This piece is not about endurance as heroism, but endurance as attrition. It asks: what does it mean to be kept alive in ways that slowly undo you?

[i] Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012), p. 10.

Biography

Gre is a Black Midwestern American composer, multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, and vocalist known for her genre-less compositions created through collaboration. Their artistic practice is deeply rooted in storytelling and the visceral realms of the imaginary, exploring the opacity of human experience. As a sound artist-researcher, Gre delves into the applied use of Endarkened Co-Composition, a collaborative method they developed for generative sound and music-making. This approach centres Black and Indigenous forms of storytelling and story-keeping, utilizing methods such as storytelling, interviews, and informal exchanges. Endarkened Co-Composition is a non-linear process focused on creating a space of endarkened co-presence where shared stories and experiences fundamentally shape the sonic outputs. Their work has been exhibited at notable venues such as Lindisfarne Castle (Holy Island, UK), Lisson Gallery (London, UK), The Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, USA), and Queens Museum (New York, USA).