Why is why of no stranger

A first-person sound-film without image
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Why is why of no stranger is a first-person sound-film without image; an immersive acousmatic environment with no beginning or end, in which the ‘film’ emerges through the listeners’ ears rather than eyes. Motives and modalities from cinema, radio-play, and first-person videogames are abstracted to develop and destroy fragments of narrative, space, place, and psychogeographic auras.

Why is why of no stranger contemplates states of being and the resonance of experience. It is concerned with embodiment, mediated memory, and hyper-reality. The work is composed using sound material from the artist’s personal archive, recorded in various sites during the span of five years. Real, lived spaces and real, lived events, represented through recordings of their sonic existence at a specific moment, are combined, juxtaposed, altered, or enhanced: from soundscapes, to incidental sounds, to actions, to sounds performed on-location, and to the noise of the apparatus itself – microphone handling noise, electromagnetic interference, the sounds of microphones being destroyed by the elements as they record. Human bodies, bird bodies, animal bodies, machine bodies, the bodies of spaces, and the bodies of media create a cyclical environment of fragmented narratives – a synthesis of ‘media-stored’, and thus ‘media-altered’ memories where the experiencing body occupies the center as perceiver and generator.

All sounds where recorded by the artist between 2008-2013 in:
USA: Mount Rainier, Washington; Seattle, Washington; Redwood National Forest, California; Humbolt Redwood Forest, California; San Francisco, California; Oahu, Hawaii
Austria: Vienna; Kramsach, Tirol
The Netherlands: The Hague; Scheveningen; Ijmuiden WWII bunkers
Greece: Chrisi Akti, Crete; Kontokynigi, Crete

Why is why of no stranger was commissioned by the Ohrenhoch Gallery (Berlin, DE) for the Sonic Activism series. It was exhibited in the gallery’s multi-room basement, and diffused in a continuous loop by Ohrenhoch’s custom-made bass box sound system (2015).  It was also part of the ‘Electric Poetry’ exhibition at the Albert van Abbehuis in Eindhoven (2018).

• Next Creative Feedback workshops
• Previous Modern Body Festival 2014: Art as research through experience