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Multilayered

September 9, 2004

Saturday August 28 surroundings of Reykjavik:

Saturday a little more than a week ago we (the staff at the department of Fine Arts) rented a car and went sight-seeing around Reykjavik experiencing hot springs dead vulcanos The Great Geysir fantastic panoramic landscaps and ended up at a lobster restaurant. On the way back to Reykjavik in the evening me and Karen Kipphoff had a long conversation in the front of the car. She was asking all kinds of difficult questions about past works of mine that forced me to think again about a lot of issues that I’ve once been concerned about and solved to the degree that they are now getting less of my intention than they once did. During the conversation I re-realized how many aspects and layers are present in a work how many different problems and issues the art work is dealing with in various ways. During the presentation the day before I’d been concentrating on certain issues only. That easily can lead to the misunderstanding that those issues were the only ones I was concerned with during the creation of that specific work.

In Trondheim I started wondering if it is possible to structure thoughts on and aspects of an artistic work in a similar way to how data programming is approaching problem-solving: by breaking large problems into smaller ones smaller problems into even smaller and so on until it all becomes a number of fairly simple tasks that can be readily solved. I’m not at all sure that it might be of any use but I’ll keep the thought at the back of my mind for a while.

Here’s a brief attempt at creating such a structure for some parts of the installation in Trondheim

Installation
video
paintings
sound
harmonic/rhythmic structures
gestures and physical presence
painterly gestures. Painting as
performance or action in time
rhythms and time structures in
the video material
interaction
groups of sound
room
white room
4
horisontal stripe of sounds
vertical stripes of loudspeakers
interactive – near the door
remote hiss near the opening to
the next room
dark room
group of 7 loudspeakers and a sub
the wooden laptop
downstairs
security issues
sound in space
awareness of the space
immersive
loudspeakers as physical/sculptural objects
unity and diversity {
this one would have to call e.g.
sounds.harmonic/rythmic structures()
}
relationship between sounds video and painting
relationships between paintings and video
relationships between paintings and sound
relationships between video and sounds
relationships between all three
the breakdown of separate components
the merge into a common mixed media
collaboration as artistic method
dialogue
respect
curiosity
openness 

Karen obviously has got to be a very good supervisor. During the tripp she invited me to collaborate on a project to happen next year. It looks interesting and different from the projects I’m already involved in and I’m looking forward to it.