Beyond the Sound

Artists: Jana Winderen, Interspecifics, Gil Delindro, ::vtol::, Raviv Ganchrow, Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand, Ioana Vreme Moser.

Soundscapes at the borders of melting glaciers, acoustic phenomena in liquid analogue computers, sonifications of planetary phenomena or changes in the electrical potentials of cells. These are some of the themes that the exhibition Beyond the Sound (House of Arts Brno, Czechia, April 5–July 14) conveys. “Sound serves as a medium that mediates a normally inaudible, invisible, microscopic and changing world. The main criteria for my selection were approaches that give concrete meanings to abstract sound through experimental methods,” says curator Jiří Suchánek about the concept of the exhibition.

Jana Winderen’s sound compositions are created from recordings from the depths of the Barents Sea. Plankton rustling, crustaceans clicking, iceberg cracking and whale voices are combined into an Arctic symphony that, in the face of global warming, can be both reassuring and unsettling at the same time.

Raviv Ganchrow works with the phenomenon of so-called telluric currents—electrical discharges taking place between the Earth’s crust and ionosphere. In order to make natural signals perceptible to the human ear, Ganchrow has designed a sophisticated system around and in the House of Arts that reduces anthropogenic noise.

Gil Delindro uses natural materials, which he always places in a broader contemporary social and environmental context. In the case of the Resilience series, which are on view in the exhibition, these are the charred bark of cork oaks, which refer to the encroachment of human activity on nature and landscape, but also to the long-term adaptive natural mechanisms created to defend against forest fires.

Ioana Vreme Moser presents two works that explore external memory. The first object represents memory stored in the flow of water, referencing a remarkable but forgotten lineage of analogue water computers, the second installation explores the erosion of data in retired silicon microchips exposed to destructive ultraviolet radiation.

Dmitry Morozov alias ::vtol:: presents the Duga project, in which he focuses on the Schumann resonances (low-frequency planetary atmospheric resonances of electromagnetic radiation), which, even a hundred years after the beginning of research, is still an unresolved area, partly due to misinterpretations of pseudo-scientific hypotheses from the New Age field.

In their work, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand are interested in exotic and often understudied scientific phenomena such as sonoluminescence or sonolevitation. In the case of the Brno exhibition, this is the phenomenon of acoustic cavitation, i.e. cavitation bubbles imploding in a liquid. During these processes, extremely complex quantum phenomena take place with short-term temperatures comparable to those at the surface of the Sun.
The Nomadic collective Interspecifics, represented in Brno by Leslie García and Felipe Rebolledo Carvajal, focuses on interspecies communication. With the help of new technologies (e.g. machine learning, advanced sensors) they are looking for ways to establish a dialogue between humans and organisms with which we do not share a common sign system—such as microbial cells.