Silence can be a lot of different things. For example, no talking, not speaking up for an issue, ambient sounds, emptiness, being in meditation, and so on. In my short movies I tried to express a different form of silence each time. In most of them, you do hear sounds for the biggest part. So it is not real silence, absence of any sound. But even the silent parts are not silent. Art is existing when a living creature has an interaction with it. That can be anything. So maybe a person just walked by some wall art and is not even aware of it being there, or someone listening to the music that they play themselves. So taking that into account, even the parts in the movies where there is total absence of sound, are never silent.
Silence does not exist for humans. If it is totally silent around us, we will still hear our heartbeat, breathing, stomach sounds, etc. So it is only something we can imagine, but never experience. Only totally deaf people. It made me realise that my hearing sense is always active. But that is also for my vision, when I close my eyes, I see black. But I can choose to give it no attention. Then I don’t experience the sense. With smell it also works a bit like ambient sounds. When there is a certain light smell in the background, you will not smell it after a while. But a person who comes into the space will smel it. But if the smell is strong, you will notice it every moment. The same with sounds that are harder. But there is a difference. With smell, if you are already used to it, you can not smell it when you try to focus on it. With ambient sounds, you can hear them again whenever you focus on them. With feeling it does work the same as hearing, when you focus on what you feel, you will feel it consciously, even when the touch is very light. With tasting I feel like it is a bit more difficult. Or maybe I am not that conscious of that sense of mine. But also with this sense it is always present. So what I conclude out of comparing with other senses, is that for every sense the same counts: it is always active and present, but we can still experience the absence of it, just by filtering them or not focussing on them.
