Session 8 Spatial Perception
Sunday, 10:40 – 12:00, De Balie
How do we perceive space? How do artists reflect on the experience of space and heighten the sense of space using sound and vision in sometimes radical or radically reduced ways?
Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag
raum-Arbeiten – The Space of Sound and Acoustic Architectures
Since the Renaissance the visual sense in our Western civilisation dominates our orientation, and since the geometrization of the world Euclidian space comes first. Even in the notation of sound and music we can see this priority. When in the middle of the 20th century space became again important as a parameter of music like for example in Stockhausens Kugelauditorium in Osaka 1970 which had more than 40 channels and speakers, space as an acoustic parameter was, and still is, limited to directions where the sounds comes from. In the late 1980s, working on the philosophy of the perception of space, models of space and on acoustic phenomena in composition, I started to create non-Euclidean spaces out of interference-fields of dozens of high tuned sinus sounding units. In the beginning of the 1990s I started to work on the physicality of the sound itself: standing sinus-pressure waves created an amorphous sonic architecture inside the Euclidean architecture where the audience could walk or better dive through. In 1993 I realized, on an IRCAM Workstation, together with programmer Jörg Spix, the first endlessly rising and falling movements in noise to create a paradoxical situation of perception by a simulated volume movement in the space. The main problem of talking about the acoustic space is, that what we call hearing happens in our brain and not only with the ears, with the space of our body too, and also combined with all the other senses. Sonntag will talk about the theoretical background and the development of his raum-Arbeiten and sonic architectures.
Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag (DE) has an academic background in instrumental music, fine art, art history (new media), music theory, composition, philosophy and cognitive science. He has mostly focused on site-specific installations based on sound and biomass but also specifically on monochrome gas discharge light.
Hans Christian Gilje
Conversations with Spaces
HC Gilje researches how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. In his own work he works with real-time environments, installations, live performance, set design and single-channel video to make this research tangible.
HC Gilje (NO) creates installations, live performances and videos. He was also a member of the video-improv trio 242.pilots.
Jacob Kirkegaard
Acoustic Spaces and Unheard Sounds
Jacob Kirkegaard’ works focus on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Using unorthodox recording tools, including accelerometers, hydrophones and home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard captures and contextualizes hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments: a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself. Kirkegaard will talk about his works.
