A temporary sound installation at the Hökarängen metro station in Stockholm, using 14 public address loudspeakers mounted evenly along the platform.
The work was part of Augmented spatiality, a public art project for the suburb of Hökarängen in Stockholm in which the artworks, performances and other comprised events were integrated into the social and spatial processes taking place in the public sphere. Augmented spatiality was curated by María Andueza.
Metro stations can be considered non-places; passengers arrive and spend some time waiting for arriving trains, or pass through the station after having disembarked. Most likely few of them pay any particular attention to the station while there. The space remains ambivalent, and do not incite any sense of belonging. The piece offset this, in particular enriching their experience and awareness of the place for the period of time spent waiting at the station, providing subtle and more explicit alterations and additions to the soundscape at the station.
For arriving passengers, the metro station also serves as a gate, port or entrance to the local neighbourhoods. Although their stay at the platform is brief, Trond Lossius would like to explore the possibilities of the sound installation to provide a flavour of what they might expect as they exit the station and wanders into the neighbourhoods, by incorporating sounds reflecting local culture and soundscapes.
In his works, Trond Lossius generally make use of surround sound played back through multiple speakers distributed throughout the space. For Lossius sound spatialisation (the act of locating sound in space by distributing differentiated audio to multiple speakers) serves a multitude of purposes that includes activating relationships between sound and space, and raising the awareness of and sensitivity to the place where the listener is situated. He intends that this sound installation might entice the audience to stay for an extended period of time, contemplating both the work and its site. Trond Lossius proposes using spatialisation to create illusions of sound moving along the platform.
Sound material for the installation will be based on Ambisonic surround microphone recordings, made in situ. Rather than recording a specific sound, Lossius records a place, and a clear sense of the place is retained when played back over multiple speakers. These spatial recordings can be further processed, offering possibilities for resulting sound to drift from the authentic to the abstract.
Supported by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme, Storstockholms Lokaltrafik, the Municipality of Bergen and BEK – Bergen Center for Electronic Arts.
