Reality based audio workshop
Borealis festival 2019, Struer Tracks 2019
Reality-based Audio Workshop is a group of accomplished artists from
Norway and internationally attempting to re-think the relationship
between sound and reality in our time. The artists all use field
recording as the core of their artistic activities, and approach a
site armed with advanced recording technology from hydrophones to
surround sound microphones. The recordings are then improvised and
mixed collaboratively into a sound work. Participating artists are
Signe Lidén, Alexander Rishaug, Bodil Furu, Rune Søchting, Yngvild
Færøy, Jiska Huizing, Siri Austeen, Joakim Blattmann, Espen Sommer
Eide and Ernst Karel.
13March2019 Reality-Based Audio Workshop: Mongstad
In the project Reality-based Audio Workshop, some of Norway’s most
experienced sound artists attempt to re-think the relationship
between sound and reality. Initiated by BEK – Bergen center for
electronic arts, the artists have visited Mongstad, an industrial
area North of Bergen, to record on-site and follow CO2 gas from the
refinery, through the CO2 capture facility – which Jens Stoltenberg
called Norway’s “Moon Landing” – to an algae plantation where CO2 is
used in the cultivation of edible algae. The attempts at making a
circular path of the CO2 in this facility, becomes a symbol of the
biggest issues facing Norway today, concerning our past and our
future. Notions of “place” must be seen in new light when concepts
such as “post truth” and “fake news” in recent years have become
actualised. Do we need to find new ways to do reality-based audio
recordings when the differences between truth and fiction have
become politicised? Can sound art find a new way to bridge the gaps
of a more polarized media reality?