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The Atmospherics I - The Place Sound Builds In Passing

Installations

Stiftelsen 3,14 Bergen, November 2014.

14 channels of sound and 3 HD video projections. Loudspeakers are arranged around the edges of the gallery space, on the floor and in windows. Sacco bean bags distributed around the space encourage visitors to relax in different parts of the room where they will experience the soundscape in different ways.

 

The Atmospherics is an ongoing collaborative project by Trond Lossius and Jeremy Welsh, based on field recordings made in various parts of Norway using digital surround-sound recording equipment and video in HD and 4K formats. The project builds further upon earlier collaborations, including the research project Re:place which took place in 2012-2013 at Bergen Academy of Art & Design.

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The underlying premise of The Atmospherics is to investigate particular auditive and visual qualities of a variety of different kinds of landscapes and locations and to work with the resulting material within large-scale installations where both sound and image establish a sense of place.

The project is not documentary in nature – individual installations will combine imagery and sound from a variety of locations – and neither is the relationship between image and sound illustrative or literal. A degree of re-working and abstraction will transform the raw material in order to emphasise certain qualities and to downplay or mask other aspects of the material.

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Both Lossius and Welsh have been concerned with building media installations that establish a dynamic space within the exhibition environment and that are usually based upon a flow of associations, cross references and meeting points between different media and processes. Drawing upon interests in video art, sound art, experimental cinema and contemporary music, their practice is inherently hybrid and addresses a range of potential publics.

The approach to working with sound and image is investigative and often open-ended. Although technical aspects of installations, such as numbers and placing of loudspeakers, are carefully planned, there is a great deal of improvisation in the realisation and fine-tuning of any given installation. Whilst the raw material speaks of remote places that have been visited and recorded, the elaboration of a specific place in the here and now of the installation is a matter of collaboration, dialogue, experiment, trial and error, refinement and re-evaluation.

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Images and sounds that are used may be experienced in different ways by the viewer – as an integrated aesthetic statement that can be appreciated in its own terms, as a series of memory triggers that are dependent upon the viewer’s perceptual engagement, and also as a meta-medium that is in conscious dialogue with histories of field recording, soundscape and the cinematic depiction of the landscape.

The material used in the first three installations within this project was gathered in North Hordaland, Sogn & Fjordane, Hardanger, Sotra and Bergen. The process of gathering material continues in 2015 and will encompass other locations.

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14 channels of sound and 3 HD video projections. Loudspeakers are arranged around the edges of the gallery space, on the floor and in windows. Sacco bean bags distributed around the space encourage visitors to relax in different parts of the room where they will experience the soundscape in different ways.

The three videos have different durations, so that the combination of three images changes constantly. Certain images feature in all three projections and on rare occasions, these images converge.

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Sound and image were recorded contemporaneously at the same locations, but are non-synchronous. Both are treated in different ways, to retain essential qualities of the recording’s location and at the same time to become abstracted and distanced. The installation is a composition based on field recordings, but does not attempt to be an indexical, naturalistic representation of the landscapes it explores and reproduces.

Each iteration of the project will be a unique installation that recombines the recorded material in different ways to create a specific atmosphere or ambience that is determined both by the audio-visual materials and by the location in which the work is exhibited.

 

The Atmospherics has been supported by: The Municipality of Bergen, Arts Council Norway, Norwegian artists’ project fund and BEK – Bergen Center for Electronic Arts.