Asa Helena Stjerna is a Swedish artist working with sound installations for a long time now, with more than 30 exhibitions on her curriculum, focusing mainly on speakers capacity in different environments, either multichannel or mono channel. In her book Before Sound: Transversal Processes in Site-Specific Sonic Practice, she talks about how we should normalise the usage of this art form daily. It’s not only about connecting and wiring speakers. It’s also an experimental practice and cannot be repeated concerning the sight. There’s always a relation between the site and the installation. Asa explains that there’s also a process behind this thinking. For instance, she mentioned how an institution requested her to make a sonic installation in a Hospital that needed a space where the attendants felt relaxed.
She has also been researching the need for making sound art for sound spaces. She refers to the ongoing art projects directed to the environment, specifically global warmings, such as Winderen or Kirkegaard. The sound installation Currents (2011) is based on a scientific project in the ocean surrounding the Faroe Islands, whose research examines the inflow of warm waters in the North Sea and its links to the melting of ice in the northern hemisphere. Currents is created as a site-specific real-time-based sound installation, funded by NOTAM (Norwegian Center for Technology in Music and The Arts), in the vast glass foyer of the Oslo opera house. The installation emphasises and investigates the unique spatiality of the building. Sonification is traditionally defined as a subtype of the broader category of auditory display, which uses non-speech audio material to represent information (Kramer). Nevertheless, Asa thinks that there is a problem with established traditions of representation in artistic sonification. Mare Balticum was a project funded by the EU to measure the sound levels on the Baltic Sea by vessel traffic produced by six nations connected to that area. It looks like an autobahn.