Other Voices for a Second Sight*

VITO ACCONCI

Installation (wood, acoustical board, glass, plastic netting, swivel chair, red light,
audio equipment & audio, video & slide projections).

A room like a recording studio: the ceiling is low, the walls are brown
acoustical board—a swivel chair faces an audiotape deck and speakers on a table
attached to the back wall—a red light blinks on the wall.
Each side wall is cut by a long, narrow, horizontal window: a view into a
“sound room,” on either side of the recording studio. These sound rooms are
silent, and dark; now and then, they’re “turned on.”
All the while, in the recording studio, the tape recorder plays back an all-
night radio talk show, the voice of an all-night disc jockey. Twelve programs, three
minutes each: family autobiography, a murder mystery, science fiction, invective, a
torture report. I come back each night with a different name, I pun myself out of
existence. Each program fades off into wistful music, a quiet introspective jazz,
now and then a pounding jazz.
While the soft music drifts, there’s interference from one of the sound
rooms. The sound room to the left is dark, crowded, vertical, and fast. From
opposite corners, slides are projected, multiplied, through vertical rows of
transparent screens: my body in negative, bending and stretching and exercising—
my face and body in color, pasted over with political posters. Sound escapes
from the black room: the click of teletype machines; my voice is too fast, voice
over voice at different levels, I’m talking the language of revolutionaries, guerrilla
fighters—I’m practicing, rehearsing.
The sound room to the right is light, sparse, horizontal and slow. From
above and below, slides and video are projected, multiplied, through horizontal
rows of transparent screens: circling sequences of sky and water—my body shot

* Other Voices for a Second Sight was first installed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1974.
It was later installed at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in 1998, and most recently at the Whitney
Museum Into the Light exhibition.

OCTOBER 103, Winter 2003, pp. 63–103. © 2003 Vito Acconci.

64 OCTOBER

from above, naked, stretched out as if swimming, bathed in colored filters. Sound
escapes from the white room: the chirping of birds; my voice is a whisper, voice
upon voice—I’m throwing my voice, I’m narrating love and mysticism.
In the recording studio, my voice squeezes in under the music; my voice is
changed, it comes from out of the past or from a far-distant future; the voice is
slow, raspy, machinelike; it resists the seductions from either side.