On foley and Plato’s shadows

I’ve been listening to a lot of philosophy podcasts lately, I can’t seem to concentrate on books at the moment. So I started thinking about Plato’s allegory of the cave. How we are all now stuck in our caves with only the shadow of the inter-web, replicating the world around us, chained together by the super speed fibre optics.

I’m interested in the shadows, in the replication of a “real” thing. But they don’t talk about sound in regards to the cave (or do they?). Were the sounds they heard real? The real sounds from out side the cave, just a little muffled. A shadow of a sound.

I’ve started making some shadows of the body, shadow parts. The sound of paper nails on wood is nothing. So you must replicate the sound too. Foley the fake world to fool the shadow people. Or does the replica then become the Real?

I’ve always been interested in how you can manipulate the meaning or the reading of an art work. When you change the sound of a piece it’s similar to adding subtitles. You can change the reading, you can lie you can control if you wanted to. From foley I started thinking about the fake film stills and subtitle works of Sarah Bahbah. I really like how she imposes meaning to the images in a way we are used to trust without question. But maybe we shouldn’t.