Asa Stjerna
Asa Stjerna is a sonic artist from Sweden, she uses listening as a method of exploration, these explorations are reworked and expressed through site specific installations. Asa explores sounds transformative quality, she uses sound as a means to transform experience of a site/situation. Sites/situation relates to environments, this could be the ocean, the weather etc. From Stjerna’s perspective, the small processes an artist does in the preparation to present their work are just as valuable as the end sonic result. These, she says, are affective inter relational processes, and engagement with the site. Stjerna emphasises the importance of looking at what is not yet in a space, how the space can be transformed into something else.
Asa presents her piece ‘The Well’, a permanent installation in the Swedish Institute in Paris. She installed a mono channel work inside the dried out well, she talk about engaging with the stone wall’s ‘agency’ as she puts it. She describes having a dialogue with the space in question, an experimental practice, an engagement with the space.
Stjerna explains some points from her writings on transversal practices of sound installation:
- Mapping the affective lines– The process of site specific exploration, this is what it means to find the space, researching the site engaging with archives etc. This is, for Asa, a very vivid/active engagement.
- Establishing new connections– The artistic design process. Stjerna provides an example of installing a loudspeaker with a cable on a site, this is not just an action of laying a cable. It is engaging in a dialogue with the agencies of the space.
- Becoming Non-Autonomous– It is important to understand your own situated perspective.
Recently Stjerna has become interested in the ocean as a public space. Asa next presents her work ‘Currents’ made in 2011. It was a site specific piece for the opera building in Oslo, the piece was based on scientific measurement data from the North-Atlantic current in the North Sea, this current Is associated with the melting of ice in the northern hemisphere. The piece was a signification of real-time data, this data was acquired at the floor near the Faroe Islands. Water flows past a cable inducing an electrical current, giving an indication of the oceanic current. The sound was generated using 4 data streams, the North Atlantic current, the semi-diurnal tide, the diurnal tide and the ionosphere. The slow patterns of energy from the tidal streams and the ionosphere where sped up 9 million times to make them audible. The tidal information was translated into drones, while the ionosphere was split into a granulated sound texture. The data from the North Atlantic current was used to control the textures and spatial positioning of the sounds. This was dispersed in the space through 22 loudspeakers.