The slowly rotating central figure, the cascade of golden speaker wires, the little cars working hard to go nowhere, the erratic outbreaks of a whispered conversation, a vision of a small girl caught only from a great distance, the ravaged surface of a lonely moonscape - all of this is bathed inthe work's most significant element: the sound of Erika herself. Quietly audible everywhere in the space, the tape loop is a haunting montage of cooing, chirping, and popping noises. Resembling alternately dolphin communication and bird calls, these recorded vocalizations are as close as Erika comes to speech.Autistic children make these kinds of sounds, Fukawa says, in part to block outside noise, which they cannot filter and so suffer as unrelenting bombardment, and in part to comfort themselves through this elemental reassurance of their own identity.
