Carsten Höller & Miriam Bäckström

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 23 Number 4, 2005

Transcript

Zoë Irvine: I’m here in the Nordic Pavilion with Carsten Höller and Miriam Bäckström. You have two very different pieces of work here, one is the amplified pavilion, which we’re standing in the corner of and the other is a bookwork which is called ‘All Images of an Anonymous Person’. To start with I’d like to ask you about the collaborative process, because you’re both artists in your own right, with your own practices?

Carsten Höller: Yes, this is our third common project. What we have been doing here is to make a book that contains all the images ever taken of one single person. There are also other people on the images but every image, with this person on, is in the book. She’s twenty-four years old and we have 3,147 images. The book has more than 500 pages, we are creating her story and we want to know who she is, but she constantly escapes us. She has something very enigmatic in her face. It’s frustrating because you don’t really get it, but at the same point it’s very productive and produces a lot of inner voices, inner stories. It’s melancholy as well because she is so young still and there’s really nothing wrong with her and she could have a very fulfilled life.

Miriam Bäckström: First we made a selection; we had over 100 people who wanted to participate. When we made the final choice we decided that it would be nice to meet her and she also wanted to meet us.

CH: After the book was finished, not before.

ZI: Leaving that book for a moment and coming to the work we’re standing in, can you describe what you’ve done here and what the visitor encounters?

MB: The Nordic Pavilion is normally a group exhibition and this time the curator decided to have just one big space 500 sq. metres. Instead of dividing the space we decided to divide time, so we shift space. It’s alternating, so today it’s Sweden and tomorrow it’s Norway and then it continues. We took away the two glass walls, to be able to work with an amplified pavilion, and then we put microphones all around the outside of the building and inside. Through loudspeakers the sound is increased, so what you hear in the pavilion are people around the building, but also yourself moving or making sounds. So it’s a live thing, nothing is recorded in any way.

ZI: How is that working?

CH: Technically I’ve no idea; we have a very good sound engineer who worked with us. The work is really responding to the situation. If you are here all alone, and there are no bird outside and you don’t make a sound, you won’t have any sound; it needs a sound source obviously. If you have a lot of people like now, or yesterday at the opening, it goes into a murmuring thing, where you cannot really distinguish single sounds. If there are a few people you can hear very clearly when somebody speaks outside because we have a directional microphone that goes to a specific spot outside and then the whole building can hear. We also have a microphone at the very end of the building that is transmitting the sound to the entrance.

MB: Since the sound is spread throughout the building, it’s quite difficult to locate where it’s produced.

ZI: What I was interested in here is the sound from this microphone mapped specifically to another location, or is it something more random?

CH: This last microphone, at the very end of the space, is giving sound only to one row of loudspeakers at the entrance of the space. The other five microphones that are in the space are transmitting the sound to all the other loudspeakers. We’ve been trying to sort this out and bring it to the best possible level. The loudspeakers are very special loudspeakers because they are only high frequency loudspeakers. We have a very few low frequency ones.

ZI: And high-pitched sounds are directional whereas low level sounds are non-directional.

CH: We took out the two glass walls because we wanted to avoid too much echo and reflection of the sound. But we built in some new walls, which are sound walls, and are perfect for recalling the sound on audio.

ZI: Are they hypersonic or ordinary speakers?

CH: They’re not ordinary at all; they are called line airway speakers. They are something very new, they make a very real sound, very crisp, very sharp. It’s excellent but it’s very different from the (corkshard?) speakers that we’re used to. It’s much harder to detect where the sound really comes from.

ZI: Can you tell me if there is a link between the two projects, and if there is what are they?

MB: I think there is a link in attitude or approach of how you, as an audience, approach it and how you mix with it. Looking at over three thousand images of a person you don’t know, you experience something and you also make up stories about this person, that is more about yourself. If you’re alone here not much will happen unless you do something about it. From our experience the longer you stay in the building with the sound on, the better you tune in and it’s as if the level of hearing in your head is getting more advanced. We also believe that this will affect your other senses, so leaving the building and going into the next pavilion will maybe create another experience.

ZI: That’s true. Thank you very much for taking the time.

CH: Thank you