The Ephemeral City: Songs for the Ghost Quarters

Katt Hernandez

Abstract The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the city. The aim is to offer those materials, wrought into music and sound works, for urban dwellers to deepen, remember, evoke and envision their own ephemeral cities. The themes in the project are drawn from urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city, aiming to empower a sense of place beyond commercial forces, through the fleeting, subtle and imaginary. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening. There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever- transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties. They are comprised of a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound. I have created them utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs; string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy, nyckelharpa or violin, and; sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to evoke the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–one possible version of The Ephemeral City–to argue that the evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers. The mechanism of that empowerment is the force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life. Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning Kyrkspirorna och tornen på Stockholms horisont blandar sig med radiosändningar som flyger ut över staden bredvid privatiserade våglängder, driver ner genom atmosfären och sjunker ner i det övergivna underjordiska telefonsystemet. Stockholm har byggnader som funnits där i århundraden, men är också full av den mest moderna och samtida arkitektur. Allt konkurrerar om sin plats i det kollektiva minnet. Det här konstnärliga doktorandprojektet i musik tar upp och omvandlar stadsbildens grundmaterial, skapar bilder av staden, mer subtila än de starka krafter som är i rörelse; där staden förändras så snabbt och på ett sätt som ofta skapar maktlöshet. Syftet är att erbjuda material, bearbetat till musik och ljudverk, för stadsbor att fördjupa, minnas, frammana och föreställa sig sina egna efemära städer. Ämnena i projektet är tagna från urbana minnen och omvandlingar, psykogeografi och andarna i den efemära staden. Syftet är att möjliggöra en upplevelse av tillhörighet och hemmahörande som sträcker sig bortom kommersiella krafter och istället framhåller det flyktiga, subtila och imaginära. Projektet tar sig an tre frågeställningar: Hur kan musik och ljudkonst möjliggöra ett återtagande av tillhörighet och platskänsla genom kraften i individens fantasi? Hur kan alternativa inre bilder av staden förstärka en upplevelse av tillhörighet och platskänsla? När blir berättelser, minnen och alternativa framtidsvisioner kollektiva, när kan de delas med andra och när är de helt individuella? Det finns ett improvisatoriskt samspel mellan det levande och det materiella i staden vilket möjliggör subtila sätt för de boende att återfå inflytande över sin omgivning. De konstnärliga verken i det här projektet är gjorda för att belysa dessa subtiliteter, centrerade runt ett antal kompositioner, improvisationer, konstnärliga samarbeten och ljudinstallationer. Med användande av modulära synthesisers, fältinspelningar, piporgel, multikanaluppsättningar; PureData- och SuperColliderprogram, stråkensembler med vevlira, nyckelharpa eller violin och ljudinstallationer. Valet av instrument och material är en efemär metafor för Stockholms arkitektur. Slutresultatet är en samling musik och ljudverk, gjorda för att belysa den imaginära staden. Tagna som en helhet, skapar verken i projektet en imaginär stad – en möjlig version av Den Efemära Staden – för att kunna argumentera att detta frammanande av ett efemärt rum är ett sätt att stärka de boende genom fantasins makt, immuna mot de starka krafter som förändrar livet i Stockholm, med hjälp av det drömlika, omformande och flyktiga. Lika övertygande för det inre ögat som tegelsten och murbruk är i den yttre världen.

Back to map

Moderna Museét/ArkDes (The Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Architecture and Design)

Bucky Domes at Moderna Museet

There have been two, earlier geodesic domes of note in Stockholm, both of which were designed and built by the artist and architect Bengt Carling. Both were located in the garden of Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art), the first in 1971 and the second (which was this time a part of Ark/Des's exhibitions for the year) in 2011. I have worked with several musicians who were a part of the concerts with Don Cherry in the earlier manifestation of the Bucky Dome, and was one of the producers, curators, and performers in the second incarnation. The day it was completed, I went to see Carling, and he asked me to play for him there that first afternoon, which I did.

In the 1960s, when Buckminster Fuller’s ideas saw a resurgence of popularity among young, would-be world changers, Carling was an avid follower of Fuller’s famously long lectures, hitch-hiking around the United States to follow him. Carling’s work with kites, flags, and geodesic domes have the quality of the ephemeral, in that they are an artistic expression of nomadic imagination, and shift space with materials that are, to one degree or another, barely there. These practices are a manifestation of Carling’s fiercely activism-oriented practice. Geodesic domes are light, airy structures, barely encompassing an area, yet transforming it with a very distinct sense of place, drawn both from Fuller’s own ideas and the iconic structures of idealism, activism, and dreams of alternative futures these domes came to represent. Spending time with Carling while I was joining in the work of programming and playing concerts in the second Bucky Dome in 2011 deeply influenced my overarching idea–and idea –that ephemerality can be radical, empowering, creative and transformative.

Back to Repository

Playing for Carling as he finished building the new Bucky Dome, the day before it opened for the summer in 2011.

Domes of Visions

I have referenced “imagined futures” throughout this project as the twin inhabitant of the ephemeral city, together with memory. Dreams of future cities take form in structures that become architectures of activism. Here is an example of four geodesic domes, with their roots in the visionary ideas of R. Buckminster Fuller.x

C.H.A.R.A.S.

R. Buckminster Fuller has figured prominently in my imagination and conceptions of utopia since an early age. The history of Black Mountain College is one I constantly return to as an example of a gentle, subtle force in society. That is where Fuller built the first model of a geodesic dome, and was in the company of such 20th-century luminaries of new arts in the last century as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Josef and Annie Albers, and others. These histories are well documented in the work of many authors, such as Mary Emma Harris and Martin Duberman.x

There is quite a different sort of book describing how Fuller’s work might connect with the work I am doing now: C.H.A.R.A.S.: The Improbable Dome Builders, written by Syeus Mottel.1 I do not currently own a copy of the book; it is woefully out of print, and was removed from the library where I borrowed and read it many times between 1999 and 2003. But I will paraphrase it here. In the 1960s, New York City was experiencing a tragic renaissance of ghettoization by virtue of various factors, including systematic racism. In the lower east side, there lived a group of people who found out about Buckminster Fuller and became inspired. Called C.H.A.R.A.S.–an acronym drawn from their first names–this group was instrumental in the community gardens movement as well. Fuller sent an apprentice engineer to teach the group the mathematics required for building a dome. They focused on a vacant lot where drug users hung out by day, and homeless people slept at night. The book details how this group of neighbors, their lives beset with gang violence, drugs, and economic oppression, most of whom were in dire straits, pieced together the materials, time and information needed. They built the dome, which was a weird, pink color due to the ferrocement they used as covering over its inner, paperboard structure. When Fuller got word of its completion, he boarded a plane to come and see it right away. The last page of the book, which I remember vividly, features a rather astonished-looking Fuller, staring up into the pink dome alongside its builders.

The Dome of Visions

The Dome of Visions dominated the most publicly visible part of Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (the Royal Institute of Technology, or “KTH”) campus from September, 2015 to October, 2017.x A great Plexiglass dome based loosely on Fuller’s original ”dymaxion” concept, it stood in a city with a history of ”Bucky” domes, and spoke to the sea-change in ideals in Stockholm that had occurred since the 1970s. For this reason, one of the works of this project, Deuterium: Dome of Visions, was made as a site-specific performance for it.

The Dome of Visions, like its sister structure in Denmark, is mobile, and is moved to new locations in different cities after a specified time. Although the dome in Stockholm was not a ”true” geodesic dome, architect Kristoffer Tejlgaard worked from the idea of one. Stefania Dinea, a master’s student at KTH, designed the interior rooms and levels of the Stockholm Dome of Visions, inspired by a very different set of principles and ideals: Minecraft. Built by a multinational construction firm, NCC, as a partially private project, this quasi-geodesic dome has quite a different history than the two previous Stockholm examples, which I write about below. But like its predecessors, the Dome of Visions welcomed gatherings of different communities, through projects in music, visual art and installations, along with meetings of all kinds of engineers, environmental specialists, scientists, architects, and urban design and planning specialists from the local community and beyond.

I have made two works related to this site for this project: Virvelns trädgård (The Garden of Verticils), which was an installation in the garden of the museums, and Deuterium: Dome of Visions, which took place in the newest of the three domes, modelled here to the. You may click on the titles to listen to these works.

Tip

Tip