SLOW TIME (2025)

Ice, speaker, amplifier, pre-recorded sound, single channel audio, monitor speaker, playback, dimensions variable.

The Grammar of Noise: Sampling the Everyday
Ramp, Beijing
October 18 - December 7, 2025

For this iteration of Slow Time (2019), Tom White reconfigures his installation around a live, time-based action: a block of ice slowly melts, gradually revealing the white noise emitted from a speaker encased within. The process unfolds at an indeterminate pace, allowing sound to emerge through the material’s transformation from solid to liquid. Once the ice has fully melted, the work will continue as a video document, shown on a monitor for the remainder of the exhibition.

A single-channel sound work accompanies this process, composed from close-up recordings of ice forming and melting, played back and re-recorded in a Victorian ice well in central London. This technique, inspired by Alvin Lucier’s I’m Sitting in a Room (1969), exercises the resonant frequencies of space through the act of recycling recorded sound. Slow Time invites audiences to experience sound as a temporal event — one shaped by materiality, duration, and the quiet passage of time.