Category: Visiting Practioners

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. 

NikNak is a DJ in Leeds and made history as the first black turntablist to win the Oram Award. She’s made a couple of residencies in Brighter Sound X2. She also worked abroad in Crete and Portugal. She also participates in Opera North’s “Resonance” program.

Recently, she took part in Sound UK, in a residency venue, where she could play her field recordings in an eight speakers room. There would be two types of platforms you will attend: an art gallery organised venue or a university. Both attract different kinds of audiences and have additional requirements and expectations. In 2020, she participated in a video with Dubstep legends: Blind Test // 2000s Dubs by Telekom Electronic Beats. Here’s the list of festivals she participated in: Wilderness, Live Art Bistro, Handmade. She also supports Yves Tumor, Tommy Cash, Princess Nokia, Grandmaster Flash, and Madlib. She presents Radio programs: Demon FM, Sable Radio, Worldwide FM, Balamii, BBC Radio Leeds, KMAH Radio, Subtle FM, Threads Radio, Refuge Worldwide, Crate Digs, and Alto. At Worldwide, she presents African music: People think there are only 3 or 4 main African genres; There’s so much more.

She’s pretty much everywhere in music and sound art. She has been producing hip-hoppy stuff and ambient. Bashii is her last album. Get Sun Remix is a mix of hip hop, dubstep and ambient, and it is available in her Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/niknakdjmusic. TC & the Groove Family is a band she is part of. It is mainly a group of people who attend the Leeds Conservatoire. Right now, she is composing for theatre pieces, and she makes music for a company called Tutti Frutti, which consists of music for children. 

On the first episode of the Visiting Practioner Series, Sam Auinger was the first invited. I recognise that I’ve been in touch with some of his sonic essays about the interaction of sound on a daily basis and how we could experience, acknowledge and observe the acoustic of the very divisions of our home. In this article, or sound piece, called My Pebble, Sam guides the reader into a meditative experience with a pebble and the various surfaces of one’s room. The reader should spot the differences between every material and how the sounds reverberate and interact with other objects throughout the experience. I’ve read this project exactly one year ago, and I journaled that experience in an article entitled Mindfulness and Sound Art, where I review and tried many other suggestions from artists like Ruth Anderson and Liz Phillips.

Sam Auinger is a very passionate person and he clearly dissolves his interest in a global size vision of sound. One of his idiocracies is the relation human-sound, and this could be plural, debunking both elements of contemporary issues: rural-city; sound-image. One of his most interesting projects is SONIC VISTA, a sound installation by O+A, collaborating with Bruce Odland. This work takes place in Frankfurt and works as a celebratory monument for the city’s Greenbelt, and it was intended to be a permanent installation that could be used and enjoyed by the citizens. He goes through the analysis of the city’s most iconic spots, in which regards its acoustic and functionality. After a long interpretative process, Sam and Bruce decided to use Deutschherrnbrücke (bridge) as the anchor point. This was what gave the projects name SONIC VISTA: the possibility to hear and see the whole of Frankfurt at the same time. This was the result: A gentle halo of harmonically tuned real-time sound emanates from two “Sphere” loudspeakers which radiate the sound in all directions without “hot spots” and function as visual attractors seen from the whole city.

The intent of this work, apart from giving people the opportunity of feeling their city, was to alert the necessity of rethinking our way of media consumption that usually goes by absorbing all visual things. What about the audible ones? I asked Sam on his lecture and this was the answer:

“it’s definitely a question difficult to answer.
I just heavily experience and find
daily pieces of evidence for it that the auditory
domain tells a different story than the visual.
I find myself in a world out of visual decisions, budgets and governance decisions to be made not so much in the auditory domain.
Acoustics represent a world that is in constant flux and its dynamic.“