an installation by Sam Ashley (part of The Oracle Project)
sunday january 13, 2008 – wednesday january 16, 2008
okno, brussels — residency and installation

okno.be will premier a new work by Sam Ashley called Life is Short and Getting Shorter All the Time, an installation built from simple electro-mechanical oscillators.

The installation looks, and in some ways behaves, something like organic life. The oscillators are fragile, but they succeed in filling the room with a complex noise. The idea behind the work is that the installation offers a type of noise that might be conducive to “auditory hallucinations”. This is a recurring theme in Sam Ashley’s work, and is one of the ways he seeks to bring the mystical experience into the realm of sound art.

Sam Ashley has been a kind of modern-day witch-doctor for most of his life, researching trance over more than 40 years. Life is Short and Getting Shorter All the Time is part of The Oracle Project, in which Sam seeks to create sound or visual art works that can genuinely support the flow of useful information from the soul of us to our minds.

Sam Ashley has devoted his life to the development of an experimental (and non-religious) mysticism; his only “belief” is that we can find out for ourselves. His musical, performance and other artistic works are the result of this. He hopes to offer simple windows onto some of the unusual experiences and phenomena of a shamanic lifestyle. Many of his performance works over the last 30 years have featured experiments in authentic spirit possession, for example, and most of his music has dealt in some way with the subject of “hallucination”. Many of Sam’s works are about coincidence and luck.