Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

For Borealis, the artists will transport the audience to Fjell Festning, a German military fortress outside of Bergen, chosen because of its altitude and position, with winds coming in directly from the Atlantic. Sound movement through the atmosphere is affected by the wind, the open landscape and the winter temperatures, which can bend the wave front, causing sounds to be heard where they normally would not, or vice versa, creating acoustic shadows. The inside of the old cannon well is repurposed into a field laboratory to investigate sound at various altitudes. The participants on this journey will experience live vertical studies outdoors, and underground in the cannon well, as a descending vertical soundscape shaped by Sommer Eide and Lidén. The duo’s previous work, the critically acclaimed 2016 performance Altitude and History, was staged in the hills above Nikel, Russia. Leading the audience on a performative field trip, they delved into the connections between wind and sound at various altitudes and its connections vertically to layers of local history.

*You have two options for experiencing Vertical Studies on Saturday March 11th:
*

1st Group at 14.00-15.15
Bus to Fjell Festning leaving from city center 13.00, back in Bergen 16.15

2nd Group at 15.30-16.45
Bus to Fjell Festning leaving from city center 14.30, back in Bergen 17.45

Buy your tickets for Vertical Studies at Borealis here

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About the artists

Signe Lidén is an artist based in Amsterdam and Bergen. Her installations and performances explore man-made landscapes and their resonance. She is interested in how places resonate – in memory and matter, through narratives and as ideological manifestations. Her installations are often a combination of sound recordings from specific places and sculptural objects, where the material of the objects become ‘speakers’. Her work ranges from sound installations and performance to more documentary forms such as sound essays and archives. She has made works for Dark Ecology, Center for PostNatural History, VOLT, Resonance Sound Art Network, Hordaland Art Center, Kunsthall Oslo and nyMusikk, Touch Radio, and Interferenze New Arts Festival among others.

Espen Sommer Eide is a musician and artist based in Bergen. With his music projects Phonophani and Alog, he has composed and performed a series of experimental electronic works. As an artist his works investigates subjects ranging from the linguistic, the historical and archival to the invention of new scientific and musical instruments for performative fieldwork. His works has been exhibited and performed at Bergen Kunsthall, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Manifesta Biennial, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Stedelijk Museum, GRM, De Halle Haarlem, Bergen Assembly, Sonic Acts, Mutek, Performa and more.