Works in this series
A Series About Translating Nature.
Mikael has created a work that concerns the opposition between mediated pictorial images and the physical experience of a site itself. A computer program, featuring a live video feed at the site, will dissolve and expose its very own process of translating data into human-understandable signals, through distorted video and distinct soundscapes.
The theme of meditation, zen, and loneliness – bodily and spiritual – is something recent that has been haunting me. I want to begin my journey into these thematics with some of the things I experienced at Brännö, that I feel particularly strongly about. The idea rose from my listening to William Basinski's music while surveying the island. I want to work with sound and video to remediate a specific piece of land, revisiting the question “how do we enhance a natural place through technology – what does it then become if the post-process is immediately present?” The computer and its camera will be pointed towards the scene, the machine in a way “talking” or reacting to the landscape.
Vistas belongs to the genre of process artworks, with focus on how the computer will create sound and video from sometimes unrelated data. Vistas points to our anthropomorphic bias, seeing natural elements as no[n]-things simply because they are not visibly part of man's colonization of nature. Using the classical naturalist motif of the open landscape, the apparatus in Vistas tries to enhance the experience we might be having, creating an audio-visual bed that is a product of the input it receives. It begins as an invitation, a frank stretching out of the hand, trying to support one another as viewers of this landscape scene. Over time a degree of error is introduced and accumulated to mark the artificiality with which it works, slowly and erratically revealing the underlying system that controls the so-called enhancement.