What does friendship sound like? A laugh, a shared idea, a late night conversation, a muffled embrace? ‘When I think of us, it sounds like…’ is an audio visual journey exploring the complex landscape of friendship and how we remember, document, expand, abstract and stretch it to uncover shared truths. 

Through a process of simultaneous recollection, line by line unable to hear the other, we rebuilt a memory to create a new artefact. Pulling from remembered objects and an archive of photos and voice memos, we fragment them into a visual world that mimics the nature of how we remember. From this emerged The Gap. A fluctuating space that reveals the dissonance between our memories, truth, and our perception of it. The Gap exists in all facets of life and our relationships, and we aim to explore how to bridge it, fill it, empty it and sit in it’s dissonance to find comfort in what we all experience. 

“19.01.2019”, Audio experience, Sound design by Grasps, NFS

“Peep”, Mixed media, found objects, cardboard, textiles, NFS

“¥50!", Video, NFS

Instructions:
Please pick up a pair of headphones and allow the audio to soundtrack your experience as you explore the space. Have a peek! 

“When I think of us, it sounds like…” culminates approximately 3,567 hours of conversation about Friendship into an audio-visual journey that invites you to rummage around in our reconstructed memories, offering you a portal into our past. 

Our friendship and collaboration as Spacefloss are anchors for this work. From a fateful meeting in Tokyo 2019, we have since connected over a shared practice of collecting artefacts from our days. Be it recording voice memos of a train passing, a package crinkling, or capturing photos of a lost glove, a reflective shimmer, or a half eaten popsicle on the ground. Our curiosities in these archives led us to investigate why we accumulate memories, why we dig back into them and what comfort or questions they may bring. 

Through the process of extrapolating the complexities, messes and joys of friendship, we discovered what we refer to fondly as ‘The Gap’. The Gap exists between our expectations and our perceived reality. We all know this gap, it holds our insecurities, fears of being misunderstood, attempts to connect and miscommunication. We fill it, expand and even share it in an attempt to get closer to an authentic experience of our relationships. The Gap became integral to our process as we discovered it’s prevalence in all facets of life and it has shaped the work's evolution. 

We present an intimate audio journey, ‘19.01.2019’ that soundtracks the body of work “When I think of us, it sounds like…” Line by line, unable to hear the other, we reconstructed the memory of January 19th 2019. Two paths diverge and converge to reveal a fluctuating timeline informed by our individually experienced truths. Our collaborator Grasps builds upon this audio journey, manipulating melodies, found sound and vocals. Playing with granular synthesis, the music and vocals decay and build, stretching and warping to further represent the undulating nature of remembering.

The video work, ‘¥50!’ reveals the process of recording ‘19.01.2019’, and the parameters we set to highlight the gap in our dual memory, as we were deliberately not allowed to hear the other. The passing of the coin was borne of the rituals that naturally form between two people, a non-verbal signal allowing the other to speak. 

We acknowledge the importance that objects hold in our friendship, which developed into a physical world that offers an alternate channel for understanding, both enriching and blurring the experience of memory. Working from the artefact of our reconstructed day, we pulled apart the objects significant to our remembering, deliberately fragmenting and obscuring them. ‘Peep’ invites you into our shared visual world, daring you to piece together the memory through these glimpses. 

See you in The Gap!!  ✧･ﾟ*:･.・゜゜ *:･ﾟ