INTERVIEW
By Niklas Östholm
Published in Catalogue for More ! than this - negotiating realities, Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, 2005
NÖ: Visual culture, visual narrative, film, TV, advertisements in all their forms. In our age, vision clearly dominates among the senses. In a series of works, you problematize how we encounter and experience space, above all via the accentuation of sound. What is it that has motivated you, what led to the development of your interest?
AL: I am interested in distinguishing between auditory and visual perception in order to focus on some distinctive features of sound, and in particular our perception of sound, which fascinates me. The ear, for example, in contrast to the eye, can receive information from all directions and from various layers in the environment. For the ear, different sources of sound can exist in the same place in the acoustic space without losing their distinctive properties. In contrast, vision orients itself in a Euclidean or linear space. All perspectival models are visual, whereas auditory perception makes possible an understanding of space consistent with a circular model of thought that can point in many directions simultaneously. It almost constitutes a secret dimension next to the way we normally orient ourselves. The ear gives us the possibility of receiving information in a different way. It is a direct connection to the brain, an opening that can’t be shut, not even when we’re sleeping.
NÖ: Can you say something about how you construct a work, one like the sound and light installation you’ve made for the Biennial in Gothenburg? What components do you start with, and how do you join them together?
AL: My method varies each time. My animations, for example, require an extraordinarily comprehensive planning process, whereas, for some of my sound works, I’ve made use of actors and let them improvise with almost complete freedom. As far as the work for the Biennial in Gothenburg is concerned – the working title by the way is Slamming the Front Door – my initial inspiration was the potential I see in creating a situation where the listener is transported to an imaginary space, that is, that she is in one room while she is imaging herself in another. My work becomes a kind of radio theater where I try to incorporate the circular and nonlinear in relation to time, space and narrative. A zone for spatial distortions and reorganized time that is focused on the psychological, the perceptual, and the cognitive, and thereby is open to other possibilities of identification. Concretely, I want to use the last sentence of Henrik Ibsen’s piece Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House) as my starting point, as well as the main character Nora’s longing for freedom.
NÖ: How can we, who are both visual and aural, distinguish between these senses? You often play them against each other in an intricate way.
AL: Yes – for example in the sound and light installation, I You Later There, where the surface of the picture is replaced by an empty screen. I was trying to define a space that was both mental and physical by means of sound and light, and wanted to take advantage of the perceptual shift between seeing and hearing, between the physical exhibition space and the sound as a reference to something else. Just as in Chantal Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman, the sound loop becomes a mapping of an everyday “inner room” via its descriptions of (banal) everyday occurrences. Often, the words and the sentence are formed as multiplied, repeated loops laid over one another, and each situation appears to have been described from more than one standpoint. Here, too, I was interested in creating a form of “duplication” where it isn’t clear whether there is one, two, or more main characters and locations, nor how the viewer fits into this game. Sound is the most important source of information in the work, and it flickers back and forth together with the light, which alternately is turned up, then dimmed. The screen will thus get brighter and darker as would a film without pictures.
NÖ: The rooms in your works are experienced as architectonically empty, there are only empty walls and door openings, but they are filled with something else. It is the listening that creates the images. How do your yourself view the role of listening in your work?
AL: My use of voices makes an identification possible for those who experience the installation, but my “soundscapes” also contain another element, namely, the background sounds. In certain cases, these background sounds appear individually, and there it is they, exclusively, that give the work its orientation and meaning. In general, I make use of recordings made “in the field”: in streets, in parks, or indoors, in both public and private spaces. What’s fascinating when you listen to these recordings is that you can find frequencies and buzzing sounds that you normally don’t hear. A previously “invisible” world suddenly emerges in the studio. I have used such sounds in certain installations I’ve created, and of course I’ve also used more recognizable sound images such as a car driving by, a barking dog, a woman walking across an open square, and so on. It is interesting to me that these sounds – both the abstract ones and the recognizable ones – always elicit mental or emotional images in the listener.
NÖ: Tones, tuning, and voices – when observing and taking in your works, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to think of choral works. But literature, perhaps plays in particular, would be something one can imagine you have a special relation to. What would you say about that, what inspires you, where do you get the energy that drives your work?
AL: It comes from literature, since, in one way or another, I work with narratives and stories. I have been extremely interested in Gertrude Stein and her way of using repetition and shifts in meaning. In her books, language alternates between being something that supports the story, and being simply sound, and thereby nearly abstract. Gertrude Stein’s method becomes a questioning of whether it is actually repetition when the same words and sentences are used over again in a sequence or whether it perhaps isn’t actually a repeating, but rather a displacement in space and time. Most recently, I’ve done a piece on Bellona, the fictional city from Samuel R. Delaney’s science fiction cult classic, Dahlgren. Bellona is a city where space and time are out of joint and the architectonic reference points are constantly in motion. Bellona is just as much a state of mind or a mental landscape as it is a physical reality, and the work is somewhat reminiscent of a video game, but without in any way being interactive. Other sources of inspiration: robot psychology, secret sounds, film, and feminism.
NÖ: Your works also get me thinking about memory. Is it really possible to have the same experience of one of your sound installations more than once? Even with much effort, one still gets lost among the voices, but never in the same place more than once. At least as far as I recall. Sound is experienced as more difficult to remember. That your works seem to have neither a beginning nor an end does not of course help matters.
AL: Has anyone ever had the same experience twice? I of course understand precisely what you mean: that certain pieces are easier to grasp, that it is easier to keep tabs on time when we can note a clear beginning and a clear ending. But the question is whether these works are closer to our way of perceiving reality or whether they simply follow an easily recognizable syntax. A description, for example, of someone’s reality as a mixture of past and present, smell, hearing, vision, dreams, memories, and actual experiences in a large kaleidoscopic mix is, as I see it, much closer to our way of experiencing our surroundings than a structure with a sharp demarcation between introduction, central development, and ending, and with a clear distinction between various meanings. For me, it is important that the experience of my works be individual and that the viewers themselves shall contribute in order to make the story hang together. It is for that reason that what people experience varies each time.
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