After living enough years in New York, it’s natural to develop a sense of discomfort with silence. How could you not, when your days are filled with the particular cacophony of the city? The street drilling in the mornings. The subway wooshing during rush hour. Pop songs blaring on the speakers of every restaurant and store. Even the most leisurely of strolls is usually accompanied by the blast of a car horn or a bus braking in the background.
I’ve been a New Yorker for the past 12 years, so the last time I was anywhere remotely quiet was during a road trip through California, when my husband and I spent a night in a cabin in the middle of a forest in Big Sur. I slept terribly, of course. Where was the hiss of the garbage truck at dawn? Or the ambulance siren to lull me to sleep?
My unease with total quiet meant I never seriously considered ever trying something like a sensory deprivation tank or a silent retreat—though I have heard great things—but when I found out about Doug Wheeler’s new soundless dome at the Guggenheim, I was intrigued in spite of my predilection for noise. Wheeler, an enigmatic, West Coast–based conceptual artist, is famous for creating immersive environments that use light and space to create optical illusions, like the time he created the sense of an infinite horizon within a confined gallery room in Chelsea. For his latest project, PSAD Synthetic Desert III, Wheeler wanted to play around with the sense of sound, mainly by removing all traces of it within a soundproof room in the top floor of the museum. Wheeler’s inspiration, according to the museum, was the quiet of the deserts of northern Arizona, near where he grew up; the aim was to recreate that feeling of nothingness at the center of one of the busiest, most noise-polluted cities in the world.