I Am Sitting in a Room

Lucier was inspired to create I Am Sitting in a Room after a colleague mentioned attending a lecture at MIT in which Amar Bose described how he tested characteristics of the loudspeakers he was developing by feeding back audio into them that they had produced in the first place and then was picked up via microphones. The first recording of I Am Sitting in a Room was made at the Electronic Music Studio at Brandeis University in 1969. The second recording was made in March 1970 in Lucier's apartment in Middletown, Connecticut. The first performance of the work was in 1970 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. A third, higher fidelity recording of I Am Sitting in a Room lasting over forty minutes was released by Lovely Music in 1981. Lucier performed the piece during the 2012 Venice Biennale Musica at the Teatro alle Tese, and a recording of this performance was commercially released on the 2016 album Alvin Lucier / Alter Ego: Two Circles. Some of the last performances by Lucier included one at MIT's "Seeing/Sounding/Sensing" symposium in September 2014, and the full collaborative piece was performed for the first time in over 50 years as part of the New Ear Festival at the Fridman Gallery in New York in 2019. ==Full text==

The text spoken by Lucier describes the process of the work, concluding with a reference to his own stuttering: In live performances, Lucier would substitute "the same as" for "different from". ==Subsequent works==

In 2010, YouTube user Patrick Liddell created an homage to I Am Sitting in a Room entitled VIDEO ROOM 1000, in which he uploaded a video of himself speaking text similar to Lucier's original to YouTube, then manually downloaded and re-uploaded it 1,000 times in sequence over the course of a year, in order to demonstrate the resulting digital artifacting of audio and video analogously to Lucier's original demonstration of analog artifacting of audio. In 2013, filmmakers Viola Rusche and Hauke Harder decided to use I Am Sitting in a Room as the "main structuring element" of the documentary "No Ideas but In Things" (2013). According to the filmmakers' notes, "the various process steps of the piece [I Am Sitting in a Room] divide the film into chapters so that this work serves as an integral part of the film." In 2022, the American shoegaze band Nothing, with producer Seth Manchester, released a limited edition vinyl-only album, Don’t Look For Light In Tunnels, influenced by I Am Sitting in a Room. ==See also==