The exhibition "In the Landscape" presents works by two international artists interested in synesthesia, the convergence of sonic and visual layers of perception. The works encounter the landscape and industrial civilization in their subliminal and ephemeral meanings.
Jacob Kirkegaard: AION (2006)
Jacob Kirkegaard's AION is a sonic and visual installation that considers time, absence, and change inside the Zone of Exclusion in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Made almost twenty years after of the world's worst nuclear power accident and amidst its decaying remains, AION captures the sound and sight of an area haunted by a seemingly invisible and inaudible danger.
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For AION Kirkegaard made 10-minute recordings in four abandoned spaces, a swimming pool, a small concert hall, a gymnasium and a church, and then re-recorded the playback inside each room in which it was recorded. As he repeated this process up to ten times, sound layers increased in density and in each room a drone with various overtones slowly unfolded.
Kirkegaard's "sonic time layering" refers back to Alvin Lucier's work "I am sitting in a room" [1970] in which Lucier recorded his voice and repeatedly played the recording back in the space in which it was recorded. In AION, Kirkegaard himself abandoned these already abandoned spaces and waited for whatever evolved from the silence.
For the visual representation, Kirkegaard employed two basic techniques, one paralleled the recording technique by first filming the rooms and playing the image back and re-recorded multiple times. This was used for two of the four rooms, the church and the concert hall. For the other two rooms video feedback was used to under- and overexpose the image. In each case a different effect resulted from the change of exposure over time.
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The rooms he found and recorded were abandoned abruptly, urgently, and for good: Their inhabitants were evacuated by Soviet military and had to leave all their belongings behind. On April 26th, 1986, the explosion of reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had effaced all possibilities of human survival in the vicinity. Twenty years after the event, Kirkegaard explores the phenomenon of radiation with the medium of sound. By recording, mirroring and layering the silence of four radiating spaces he aims to unlock a fragment of the time existing inside the zone.
Jacob Kirkegaard
AION, a sonic and visual installation that considers time, absence, and change inside the Zone of Exclusion in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Made almost twenty years after one of the world's worst nuclear power accident and amidst its decaying remains, AION captures the sound and sight of an area haunted by a seemingly invisible and inaudible danger.
Jacob Kirkegaard has received international attention for his artistic ventures into "hidden" acoustic spheres: Using accelerometers and other scientific equipment, he explores those resonant spaces that usually remain inaccessible to sense perception.
Born in 1975 in Denmark, Kirkegaard is currently residing in Cologne, Germany, where he graduated with a master's degree from the Academy of Media Arts. He has also taught at the Royal Academy of Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark.
While his sound art is released by the British label Touch, his installations have been presented, among other places, at Kiasma in Finland, at Diapason Gallery in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. Among his numerous collaborators are Jim Thirlwell (Aka Foetus), C.M. von Hausswolff, Ann Lislegaard and Philip Jeck.
John Grzinich: Location Sound Films
What you see is what you hear.What you hear is what you see.
The Location Sound Film project starts with the concept of site-specific artistic activity while integrating contemporary sound recording practices that cover areas of "performance", "field recording", "improvisation" and "documentation". With the site being the prime focus, the artist as actor and instigator uses the means of sound to investigate the qualities of the surrounding space and his place in it.
The techniques involved use many existing ideas related sound recording and/or practices of experimental music, while adding the component of video simultaneously. In most cases sound recordings are captured directly to the camera and can be left alone or processed during editing. Various techniques are used to make recordings, some more clearly visible than others, depending on the type of sound captured (stereo condenser microphones or piezo contact microphones). Video in this case correlates more closely with film as it is an attempt to make use of the image as non-narrative document on site-specific, location based sound activity.
Three DVDs play a random sequence of 6 different tracks (the films). The overall piece results from chance operation, a blind mix between the discs. The films are mixed with intervals of black to give some dynamics.
Disc One focuses on environmental sounds; a ferry boat between Tallinn and Helsinki, a river in Portugal, abandoned farm ruins in Estonia, an ant hill and an evening fire.
Disc Two focuses on wind-generated sounds, some naturally occurring, some created; mobile phone towers and telephone lines in Estonia and a constructed wind harp in Portugal.
Disc Three focuses on site-specific sound activity primarily in abandoned farm ruins in Estonia. One track also shows a self-made instrument played by the artist and his colleague Hitoshi kojo.
Other artists also appear in these works, namely Patrick McGinley (UK) and Fantomas (EE).
The sounds from the films are played through different channels on speakers distributed around the space. Please take the time to watch and listen. It is likely you will never hear the same combinations of Sound Films twice.
John Grzinich (EE/US) is a mixed media artist and project coordinator who has been working primarily with sound since 1995. He has performed and worked throughout Europe the US and Japan. He has published a number of CD works on such labels as Staalplaat (NL), CUT (CH), CMR (NZ), erewhon (BE), Intransitive Recordings (US), Elevator Bath (US), Pale-Disc (JP), Cloud of Statics (CH), and SIRR (PT). These works consist of solo and and collaborative productions of experimental electro-acoustic sound pieces that result from studio and performance activity. Currently John is a project and media lab coordinator for MoKS Center for Art and Social Practice, an artist-run international residency center and project space in southeast Estonia.
Kindly supported by the Czech-German Future Fund, Danish Arts Council, CIANT, DEAI, Film and Television Faculty.
