Site Awareness in Music – recontextualizing a sensation of another place
(2020)
author(s): Knut Olaf Sunde
published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
The project argues that a sensation of another place is vital to the recognition of unfamiliar perspectives.
Space and sound are inextricably connected. The surroundings and context are central to how we perceive external stimuli, such as images, events, history, ideas or music. The brain interprets and make choices by association, based on what the body perceives and based on previous knowledge and experience. How humans listen, hear, see, perceive, interpret and react to our surroundings are based on our cognitive structures.
An unformatting of society is needed.
A risk makes the body and brain aware and alert. Adrenalin is released to the blood, enabling the organism to sudden and severe effort. Risk implies something unestablished, uncertain, a danger, something unknown. Risk implies the possibility of failure and ultimately death. Risk increase anxiety and excitement, enabling the alertness needed to maneuver away from or solve problems. When something is at stake, interest is set into play. The unknown is by its very nature beyond the body’s experience.
The project is about increasing the awareness of the situational and contextual implications of music. This is enquired through three works. For each site or situation I work with, I analyze its characteristics, such as acoustical conditions, the relations of the place to its surroundings, the shape of the landscape and historical or political context.
I try to create immersive, audiovisual projects that are connected to a certain place.
I aim to involve qualities and characteristics from the place, shaping a conversation, putting something at stake.
I conceive a music activating the place, making created situations.
I do this because there is a close link between memory, comprehension and place.
The sense of place and ability to navigate is essential to our memory and bodily existence in the world.
Main supervisor: Ole Lützow-Holm
Second supervisor: Marianne Heier
"Esparto, embodied"; Hand insights on resisting disposability
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Pilar Miralles
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
"Esparto, embodied" is the second of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. In this exposition, I aim to unpack the research process leading to this event and its outcomes after I opened doors to it on October 18th, 2025, in Organo Hall of the Helsinki Music Center.
The research project in which this series of installations is contextualized aims at understanding listening as a catalyst of remembrance in the context of a world in which things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten. The project has been developing through the documentation of my field trips – re-encountering certain places, objects, and voices in my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain –, the re-engagement with the documented material back in Finland, and its re-assemblage at the installations, so that this re-engagement can be further extended to an audience.
The first installation, "Esparto, approached", discussed in an earlier exposition on Research Catalogue , represented a first attempt at verbalizing some of the ideas derived from working in the field and working with the materials from the field. On the other hand, the second installation, "Esparto, embodied", created many frictions emanating from a deeper questioning of those preliminary ideas. This exposition subsequently represents a space where those discomforts can cohabitate with an imaginal supposition of what the third and last installation, "Esparto, revisited", could help reveal.
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3779770/3779771
Previous exposition
"Esparto, approached"; Field insights on resisting disposability
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Pilar Miralles
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this exposition, I discuss the multimedia installation "Esparto, approached", to which I opened doors last May 10th, 2025, in Organo Hall, Helsinki Music Center. "Esparto, approached" is the first of a series of three installations representing the artistic component of my doctoral degree at the Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki. The research project in which this installation is contextualized is currently titled "Listening through remembrance: An autoethnography of presence in the age of disposability". In this artistic research, the notions of listening, remembering, and presence-making are interwoven in an attempt to understand how we confer meaning and value on things despite our embeddedness in a world of disposable nature, where things are susceptible to being quickly discarded, replaced, and, therefore, forgotten.
This exposition opens up a space of reflection in the aftermath of "Esparto, approached". The installation represented a collective recall of the field practice that led me to search for signs of durability in abandoned contexts of my homeland in rural Southeastern Spain. This exposition poses the following questions about it: What happened? (Description); What does "what happened" mean? (Analysis); And, how does "what happened" keep happening now? (Further becomings). The objective of creating an online exposition right after the event is to open a window to the reflective process of this investigation before its completion, thus making visible its traces. The process itself is therefore turned into an accessible outcome that manifests the continual nature of the project as a whole.
紐扣 NiuKou (this small holding)
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Gabrielle (Zih-Cing) Chen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Collecting Project during the HKU MAS Scenography course. Through Exchanging buttons with people, finding out "What is button" and reveal insights of what the "act of sewing on a new button" mean.