After a somewhat slow morning yesterday spent with the kids I got to the Academy met Jon Arne and together we set off to pick up a rental car. Back at the Academy equipment and paintings were packed into the car and off we went for Trondheim. The drive is about 550 km but on Norwegian roads passing the mountains that took us 11 hours. Lovely drive though and interesting conversations on art music life the Universe and all the rest.
Most of today has been spent getting everything into the gallery unpacking and start mounting. The paintings and the equipment seems to have managed the trip without any damages.
The rooms are different from what I thought beforehand. The two main rooms for the installation at 1st floor are larger than I thought. One of them will be kept semi-dark the other will have more light coming in. The best room is at ground floor but is not sufficiently separated from a café in the next room. For security reasons this means that we most likely can’t take the risk of using projectors DVD-players amplifiers or loudspeakers in the room. That’s a pity as I know exactly what I’d like to do.
At the end of the day I tried different ways of positioning loudspeakers. It seems like they will be subdivided into smaller groups and I’ll use separate sound elements for each group as if each group was one piece of sound art with several pieces exhibited at the same space. They’ll all be able to blend together though.
Two different ways of distributing sound in a multi-speaker setup:
- All loudspeakers are set up to create an illusion of a continuos sound space. Sounds can be positioned at any loudspeaker travel from one to the next or be present in many or all of them at the same time.
- Eno seems to have used an approach of using a number of CD-players in shuffle mode for several of his sound installations. This approach implies that each loudspeaker (or pair of loudspeakers) is dedicated to a certain layer of the total fabric.
There are of course other ways of thinking but the two mentioned represent two different approaches of relevance to what I’ll be attempting at. For this installation I’ll try something in-between using sub-groups consisting of more than 2 loudspeakers and positioned so that they relate to the room paintings video material or other physical and visual elements of the installation.
I’d like to get a digital camera so that I could take soem images during the process. Don’t know if I can afford it though.
