WORK DESCRIPTION
"Pulling the Earth Stings" is a site and context-specific performative installation at Lydgalleriet, Strandgaten 195, Nordnes in Bergen, shown as a series of live events November 2024.
The gallery is materially transformed into an enveloping, interactive installation of ropes that form various LINE structures through the SPACE. This creates a composite scenography that gives the impression that everything is connected in a large "root network," with a densification in the gallery's lower part forming the embodiment of an "Earth Being."
Materially and technically, the network vibrates via small motors and transducers that send sound vibrations into the ropes. The audience can therefore feel the work tactilely, and at the same time also listen to the work and hear voices and soundscapes by putting their ear to the ropes.
As the audience enters the installation, a sound-activated narrator's voice invites them to follow the line of the rope and go on a speculative journey into an expanded dimension: the interior of the earth, through a network of underground caves located in the Bergen area of "Nordnes" below the gallery, where they can meet this larger more-than-human being, with whom they are invited to communicate through the sound vibrations and pressure sensors in the ropes.
This speculative narrative, as well as the human guides, then continues to invite the audience to move through the shifting dimensionalities of the installation.
When the audience then enters and connects into the denser rope structure / Earth Being body, they are invited to touch and "play" on the network via pressure sensors on the ropes, as well as programming that enables them to activate sounds and vibration frequencies. This could be said to embed the audience into a large, communal string instrument, where they have the opportunity to hear and feel the “voice” of the larger being, and in turn affect the output, so that the interaction becomes a form of expanded conversation that moves across internal and external landscapes. As the humans, materialities, and technologies all affect each other, the work potentially transforms all the agents into parts of the Earth Being of Nordnes.
Towards the end of the performance, light animates the installation so that shadows of the ropes dance on the gallery walls, and the Earth Being folds back from an enclosed and interior body to a more exterior environment that leads the audience out of the earth.
SUMMARY OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
At this stage of development, all the performative installations in the PhD would arise as articulating more-than-human beings. It was now also clear that this occurred through the methodology of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION using the mediums of space/installation, digital/electronic technology, and text/narration.
In this sub-project, I hoped the performative installation would act as a HYPERSPATIAL portal, taking audiences on a physical and speculative journey underground to meet a SPECULATIVE FABULATION—the "Nordnes Earth Being."
Here, I focused on reducing human language as the primary agency of the larger beings, instead allowing material textures and technological modulations to take prominence as articulating features. The voice of the more-than-human was therefore expressed through the vibrations, sounds, and textures in the ropes. The human voice's narration served a different function: supporting the audience in entering the speculative premise of "going underground" as they walked along a rope in the gallery and "meeting an Earth Being" as they approached a rope structure.
With technical engineer Sindre Sørensen, we used the visual programming language Max/MSP and the electronic prototyping platform Arduino to connect vibration motors and transducers (small speakers) with the rope. The transducers transferred voices, sound effects, and vibrations into the rope, so you could feel it with your hands/body and hear it if you put your ear to the rope. The motors were integrated via Max/MSP to play in sync with the sound, eliciting a type of “subwoofer effect” that boosted the output from the transducers. This also contributed to a strange “parallel dimension” of vibrating, almost “creature-like” tones, playing alongside the sounds. To enhance the effect of a conversation with the larger being, we also built the sound/vibration to have a level of interactivity.
Following the methodology of engaging the rope as a LINE that moved into other dimensionalities, I wanted the rope structure to fill the whole gallery and transform between being a context/site and a content/being. Here, I designed different rope shapes that changed how LINES operated in SPACE, and therefore also changed the audience's perspectives or relationships. In this way, MOVEMENT, both by the audience through the line structure (individual movement) and as vibrations in the structure (distributed movement), would create transitional spaces or portals to enter new constellations or parallel worlds/embodiments.
This individual movement could also be reflected as changing from visual distance, engaging a classical linear perspective, towards spatial, sonic, and haptic immersion, in a way that could be understood as collapsing the visual distance. The movement from the visual to the tactile could also be articulated as a movement between external and internal experience. This invitation to fold into the Nordnes Being, almost like an embrace, might also contain an invitation to become distributed, or part of a larger body.
Additionally, I was curious about folding the linear dimension inward altogether by inviting the audience to move into the LINE as an independent SPACE in itself. A speculative movement that might just as well be articulated as an imploding fold into HYPERSPACE.
In terms of sounds, field recordings of water, rock, and wind were found to be fitting to make this environment being come alive. However, to problematise the nature/culture divide, I landed on a sound aesthetic that was both “authentic” and also (digitally) manipulated, moving towards language and rhythmical music. To elicit the dimensional shift of folding the audience into the rope, I worked with audio designer Erik Mediros to add reverb to the sound, so it seemed like there was a large space inside the thin rope. The sounds would then oscillate between more or less reverb, and thus between being very concrete and haptic, and being inside an invisible large cave.
During development, the work was set up as a full-scale sketch installation in Lydgalleriet, tested by participants to see how it worked architecturally, interactively, sonically, and haptically/vibrationally. This helped me fine-tune a series of aspects in the work, balancing between actual worldbuilding and imaginative worldbuilding. In one way, engaging the imaginary premise of the larger underground being and on the other addressing the allegorical as literal/real, and grounding the audience in the here and now of the material, aesthetic experience in the gallery by integrating site-specific features of the location and sounds of the space as part of the work.
The space was blacked out from daylight to elicit an underground environment. Additionally, artificial light was connected to the Max/MSP patch so that the light intensity could oscillate in rhythm with the sounds, as a way to integrate the expressive larger being more. The light also supported the INTERDIMENSIONAL SPECULATION, through the moving bulb inside the rope structure casting line shadows on the walls of the gallery towards the end of the performance. This had the effect of projecting the three-dimensional Earth Being onto the two-dimensional plane of the walls. In addition, it might also shift the internal absorption experienced during the tactile immersion in the ropes' haptics and sounds, by inviting the audience to move awareness out to SPACE again.
CONTRIBUTIONS
- Sindre Sørensen: Development of transducer/vibrator/Max/MSP interaction.
- Erik Medeiros: Sound design.
- Rita Maria Farias Munoz and Line Poulsen: Performing as tour guides.
- Sofie Hviid Vinther and Beate Poikane: production assistants.
- Sasha Azanova: Photo and video documentation.
- Lydgalleriet and Julie Lillelien Porter: Hosting the performative installation / events.
For a detailed description of development see the reflection page.
Credits: All material, technical and documentation work of the PhD has been done together with Sidsel Christensen. Where no name is mentioned in credits, Sidsel has done the work or documentation.
