“Invisible” sound sculpture
Surface transducers, plywood, electronics.
50 min. Loop.
The sound installation “Figure 8” emerged as part of the group exhibition “Between Us” with fellow artist: Tim Etchells, Sissel Tolaas, Tamara Grcic, Žilvinas Kempinas and Isabel Lewis.
Between Us was an interdisciplinary project which brought together dance, fine arts and academia in order to explore issues arising from the exchange of knowledge between genres and from digitalisation. Three renowned institutions from the Rhein–Main cultural scene – tanzmainz Ensemble of Staatstheater Mainz, Kunsthalle Mainz, and the Motion Bank research project at Hochschule Mainz – joined forces to investigate these questions from summer 2018 to summer 2019. The cooperative venture was be based on the piece ”EFFECT” for five dancers by choreographer Taneli Törmä and with music by Søren Lyngsø Knudsen.
“Figure 8” was based on the physical movement data (motion capture data collected digitally by Motion Bank) to generate detailed music and sound. This was mostly based on the challenge and fascination of converting the collected dataset (which looked like a long list of numbers that really could be anything) and turn it into music in the most direct way while keeping an impression of music.
Another aspect was to use the movement to pan the sound in the room for the impression of the dancers actually being present in sonic form. It was an experiment to see how much you would recognize of the original information in the translation between raw data to actual music.
The data collection element in the project was especially interesting because it had some resemblance to the way information is collected digitally from us, in our everyday lives.
What would be interesting would be to see how these profiling analysis, which are widely used, performs in the alternate setting of the perfomance.
What are the really telling about us if we don’t behave as expected?
A book/catalog about the project and artworks was released by DISTANZ verlag and available here
A couple of snippets from my process of converting movement data to music:
The music for the original dance performance “EFFECT” was released digitally and available on most streaming platforms and for download at Bandcamp.
Kunsthalle Mainz
Mainz, Germany. 15.03-16.06 2019
