"Sometimes sound summons the world with more certainty than my verse ...secretly, like twilight. The world seems lost in listening, trying to validate itself in each solitary sound." - Akio Suzuki
We have tried to invite Céleste Boursier-Mougenot already a long time ago and now we are very proud to announce our very first Displaced Sounds exhibition: From Here to Ear.
Please join us for the opening on Thursday the 9th of September 2010 at 19h00 at STUK in Leuven (Belgium).
In From Here to Ear 40 zebra finches go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from various electric guitars and cymbals. The birds create a captivating live soundscape, a unique symphonic and sensory experience.
Trained as a musician and composer, French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways. The artist puts certain laws and systems in motion which he then allows to exist and evolve autonomously, rather than merely using chaos and dissonance as compositional models.
9 Sept - 3 Oct 2010 opening hours: wed & thu 14h00 - 21h00, fri-sun 14h00 - 18h00, closed on Monday and Tuesday
Some months ago Aernoudt Jacobs did a residency here at STUK working on his latest installation Permafrost, he also did a talk on the work at a previous Displaced Sounds evening. Last October he presented it for the first time at Vooruit’s Almost Cinema exhibition (where you could also experience the amazing ‘It’s in the Air‘ by Felix Hess). The final result was extremely beautiful. If you missed it in Ghent, you have another chance to see this quiet and mesmerizing work at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 24 till 27 november at their Burning Ice program.
Permafrost is an environmental sound sculpture about the freezing process of water. An installation has been developed in which we can observe the constantly repeated cycle of freezing and melting. By means of a custom-made sound apparatus the process is made audible. Permafrost deals with the sometimes paradoxical relation between nature and technique.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity.
The formation of ice (as a process) is a fascinating (sonic) experience. It allows the approach of matter transformation - liquid into solid - as a sonic process and to experience how in the end this inaudible process becomes perceivable to the audience. From a scientific point of view I want to research sound conductivity in changing matter - how the same sounds will change along with the consistency change of water. Ice, water and the different stages in between are an ideal platform for this research. Because of their physical qualities water and ice each have a different effect upon sound. This has to do with the speed of sound. The speed at which sound propagates itself through air is about 340m/s (i.e. If sound is produced 340m away it will be heard 1 second later). The speed of sound under water is of 1500m/s; 3 times faster than air. In ice this becomes about 3300m/s. This means that in ice sound reaches its destination 10 times faster than in air. Practically this also means that as matter changes the pitch of the sound will also change. The freezing process will thus produce sounds relating directly to the growth process of crystals.
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox.
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
very very sad news last week. Maryanne Amacher died last Thursday, after she’d suffered a stroke a couple of weeks earlier. we’ll miss her and her sounds a lot.
A few weeks ago I saw a very good exhibition at HISK in Ghent. After All, Everything Is Different In The End is a group show that deals with the matter of sound and how listening is affected by a subjective notion of synchronicity. The selection of art works on show investigates listening as a simultaneous activity. Based on the simple fact that every listening situation coincides with other sonic or visual influences, the show largely explores a dialogue on the processes behind simultaneous levels of perception.
After All, Everything Is Different In The End is the second show of a trilogy in the framework of Sonic Thinking, a long-term curatorial research project on listening in the current art discourses. In an attempt to open up new spaces where critical positions and new perspectives on sound and listening can merge to enable a radical sonic thinking, the show leaves the boundaries of the unitary exhibition/listening space behind and explores unknown fields: things happen in distant places simultaneously, a radio station broadcasts the imagination of a radio broadcast, the audience is invited to submit invisible sculptures, one hundred people act as metronomes and sounds are teleported to spy out military grounds.
some good works from the exhibition:
Brandon LaBelle’s Concert is a video work presented on three monitors. The first video consists of finding people in spatial situations: sitting at a cafe table, waiting in line, walking through an open square, sitting in an open window, going up an escalator. The second and third videos act as translations of the first: LaBelle asked various people to listen to the sounds of the first video, without seeing the corresponding images, and attempt to describe what they are hearing - to tell us the scene, the location, the time and atmosphere. The final work is presented as a “trio”, with the first video in the center, bracketed by people’s responses. The only sound is that of the second and third videos, which replaces the original soundtrack in favor of people’s vocal descriptions. The work forms a play of place and its aural life by recasting the urban environment with personal portraits.
The militant sound collaborative Ultra-red present a site-specific installation Protocols For In Front, Behind And Beyond especially made for this exhibition. Two mono directional microphones are mounted on the outside of the windows facing the yard of the Leopoldskazerne, capturing the sound from the part of the building used for military intelligence and nursery training. All windows in the exhibition space are covered by walls, letting only a glowing crown of light pass through the gaps into the space. The sound the microphones capture from the outside is played back into the exhibition space on two speakers which are mounted to one of the walls covering the windows. Centered between the two speakers, a framed document instructs the visitor on how to interact with the acousmatic listening situation in front, behind and beyond the wall.
The Perfect Sound by Katarina Zdjelar is a single-channel video work which explores and investigates notions of producing the ‘perfect sound’ within the English spoken language. The fact that we each have a unique sound and voice whilst sharing the same vocal apparatus intrigues the artist who worked with the relatively recent phenomenon of ‘accent removal’ to extract the ‘foreignness’ within a subject’s accent. The video shows the subject repeating vocal exercises with a speech therapist which demonstrates the unique qualities of his accent that are the residual traces of his spoken heritage. The subsequent words take on an abstract and musical quality with their continued repetition rendering them meaningless, transforming the word into a sound. Uttering a word becomes like striking a note on the piano trying to perform a composition. Ultimately with the ‘Perfect Sound’ Zdjelar’s work asks where is an accent and investigates the notion of acoustic tolerance which is being tested between a speech therapist and his client.
The (quick) Time Machine by Nate Harrison is a re-presentation of the 1960 film adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. The film was separated into every one of its ‘hard’ edits, which were then made into video loops. Each loop was subsequently sequenced according to the original storyline across a 40-block grid, read left to right, top to bottom. At any given moment the audio is in sync with one of the grid spaces, until that space starts looping, at which point the adjacent right block begins, with the audio syncing to it. When the grid fills up the process starts over in the top left corner. The video, through its structure of exactly 1000 edits over the length of the original film, ends in the bottom right hand corner.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity. 
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox. 
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
Maryanne Amacher in 1953
A few weeks ago I saw a very good exhibition at 
Brandon LaBelle
