This entry contains a variety of material documenting my two month residency at the Nida Art Colony on the western shore of Lithuania. The colony was opened in spring of this year as a branch of the Vilnius Academy of Art, which purchased the original building in the early 1990s, but invested recently in a completely reconstructed facility. The new building houses five residency studios for visiting artists and an array of guest rooms, kitchens and conference rooms to accommodate a variety of events, workshops and symposia.

For the focus of my residency I have proposed the following:

sound – subject / object – site

This two month residency concentrates on sound and the signification resulting from the merging of material objects, affects the elements and positioning within the landscape. By listening in to this process we expand the connections to our environment by taking the role of wanderers, seekers, collectors and instigators. Daily field excursions around the Curonian Split involves phonographic studies, short sound actions and temporary installations that become the basic frames by which to listen and document. The collected materials will be edited and composed into an audio/visual film along with an exhibit containing the physical objects. Collaborations were welcome to open this working format into a continual creative dialogue between objects, spaces and the local environment.

gallery of objects and interventions

several colleagues came for short visits to collaborate, namely Yiorgis Sakellariou, Evelyn Müürsepp, Max Shentalevs, and Andrius Rugys.

From December 2-4 I gave a sound workshop for students from VMU in Kaunas. Thanks to Tautvydas and the Colony for coordinating this. The b&w photos are from Eglou Baltrušaičių.

Excerpts of 2 sound exercises:
exercise – open narrative exercise – open narrative

exercise – word association exercise – word association

This video is meant for the workshop students to illustrate how different type of microphones sound

Click here to view the embedded video.

changing seaside and lagoon of the Curonian Split

surrounding landscapes of the Curonian Split

In addition to all of this, I produced six episodes of a weekly radio show entitled the “Sound Seed Transmissions” on the local radio station Neringa FM. You can listen to all the shows here.

‘sonic scratch cycles’ is the working title for a collaborative sound and drawing project between myself and EKU (Evelyn Müürsepp). The project is based on an ongoing series of collaborative site-specific actions recorded in different locations. Each location has its own spatial and material properties which are ‘translated’ into sounds and drawings. Each action is timed and lasts as long as it takes me to make one rotation around Evelyn, who sits in the center and draws what she hears. She wears a binaural microphone setup and listens through headphones as I improvise with activating the surroundings.

Ahja river bridge
This track is the companion recording to the drawing above which was done at a bridge crossing a local river.

Silo take 02
This recording was made in an abandoned silo tower in Mooste. Notice the rain.

‘sonic scratch cycles’ was first presented as an installation as part of a group exhibition at Kibla in Maribor Slovenia. The drawings were presented in the circular hanging structure with two speakers providing the binaural soundtrack. The viewer/listener takes the role of of the ‘actors’ or ‘translators’ who preserved and presented the evidence of their actions.

While cleaning our greenhouse I found an abandoned beehive almost preserved in its entirety. This was a good chance to analyze the material composition and structure of a hive. Although delicate, the hive must have been able to house a small colony within its multiple chambers and levels. A layer of outer walls surrounded several distinct inner levels that were connected by a single strand of dried mud. The levels were composed of geometric combs formed as a highly regular pattern. This can be seen in the gallery of photos shown above.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What you hear is a live sound mix made in my backyard using both live mics and contact mics, run simultaneously through a portable mixer. No post-processing or composing was done. The video was edited from hand held material recorded on a panasonic digital camera.More videos available on my Vimeo page.

Gathering inspiration from the metal fence highlighted in the previous post, I spent a few hours wandering Tampere to search for other metal fences and railings with similar resonant qualities. There were many, each with their own characteristics. The two I highlight here stood out. But there was also a practical reason for not recording more, it was windy and the temperature was just below freezing. In these conditions your fingers and equipment starts to go out fairly quickly. I’ve ruined numerous rechargeable batteries, nearly given myself frostbite and I suspect caused some dead pixels on my digital camera sensor because of working in below freezing weather (as a warning to others who might find themselves working in the cold).

metal railing beside highway (played lightly with a mallet): mp3 file

metal railing under highway bridge (untouched): mp3 file

Just under these railings was the kind of dirty roadside snow that usually indicates the beginning of the muddy spring thaw time when the white crystalline image of winter starts to fade. Rather than see this as a mildly depressive image I found it to be a fertile environment for investigating macro landscapes.

And as I was taking the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn we past through the final remains of the frozen Baltic sea, a large field of ice pieces broken into a tapestry of cracks that were seemingly held together by subtle magnetic forces. For some reason my camera enhanced the cyan spectrum, casting a blue light over the sea-scape.