The Shower is an immersive, sonic-architectural environment produced by Pia Ednie-Brown in collaboration with artist Bruce Mowson and with the assistance of a group of architecture students (including Jono Podborsek and Tim Schork). It’s development spanned from late 2002 through to late 2005, with the most intensive period being the first nine months of 2003.

The Shower is a skin toned, skin textured, latex enclosure, about the size of a small shower cubicle. A latex skin is suspended between a rectangular ceiling and an oval shaped floor area. It has speakers, lights and a ventilation fan in its ceiling and a pressure sensor under its spongy flooring. An encounter with it goes something like this: you enter through a slit in the latex skin. Stepping inside onto a spongey, latex covered floor, the pressure of your foot on a sensor activates a sound piece and its associated vibrations. The sound was constructed to produce a ‘mass’ or thickness through the perpetual repetition of the same sound loop; one is showered into a tightly knitted vibratory field. Once inside, the fan sucks the latex taut around the body. There is a moment before realising that the latex skin is pulling in around you, enacting a kind of vaccuum pack on the body. This tight but flexible membrane can be pushed around in various ways such that both the shape and acoustics of the space can be actively manipulated. One can play this environment as an instrument.

The catalogue text (written by Bruce Mowson) for the 2005 exhibition described the work as follows:

"The Shower was conceived as a way of bringing sound to the gallery, in a fashion less compromised by that space's typically poor acoustics – flaccid, echoic emptiness. The desire to bring sound to the gallery comes from a need to experience the physicality, immediacy and transience – the power of sound – within the slow, elastic space of visual art. The piece is touched by the more extreme minimalist and abstract artists, with their inward gaze, their folding of the meaning of an object down, creating a quality of experience distilled from the conscious desire and unconscious expression of the artist. Rather than achieving the elegant simplicity of minimal forms, The Shower, I think, captures a certain savage vitality, an existential awareness that time is slipping past us, and us through it."

The Shower can also be poised in relation to an emphasis in the field of process architecture on ‘designing the design’ or designing a generative process through which multiple instances can be unfolded. But here the outcome never leaves the experiential space of performance. Rather than being outputs, the possible variations are embedded potentials. This is the case most literally in terms of the way in which the latex can be actively manipulated, within limits, into many formal arrangements by a person inside it. But it’s more than just an issue of it taking on many potential forms, because this also folds into many potential forms of feeling. In a sense, The Shower could be taken up as a design process ‘training or exercise chamber’, where the stance required to play the installation as an instrument becomes a training process for the stance required for emergent design process.

The Shower has been exhibited in the following venues:
2005 – Hatched, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.
2004 – Job Lot #59 curated by LouiseAnn Zahra, Project Space gallery, RMIT.
2004 – ‘Art For Your Senses’, The Artery Gallery, Fitzroy, Victoria

A review of the work in the 2005 exhibition can be downloaded here.