Ghost Forest | Hydrogeny | Sandmapping

The Glazen Huis front space: Francisco López presents Ghost Forest
Ghost Forest is a site-specific compositional transposition of a multitude of original recordings, made in diverse forests all over the world,  into different outdoor or indoor spaces. With the aim of creating a crisp three-dimensional, subtly immersive environment, the original captured “reality” has been evolved through extreme filtering. This process has been carried out to reveal a high frequency, ghostly spectrum of frequencies of the transposed forest environments. The different “spectral” sonic layers are automatically mixed live in the space (in ever-changing combinations) through special ad hoc sound systems specially designed for each installation, with a large number of hidden small speakers or sonic transducers, spread out in different configurations according to the spaces where it has been presented.

Francisco López (b. 1968, Madrid, Spain) is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For more than thirty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening to the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in over sixty countries of the five continents (www.franciscolopez.net).

The Glazen Huis back space: Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch present Hydrogeny
Nature’s simplest atom and mother of all matter, hydrogen feeds the stars as well as interlaces the molecules of their biological descendants . Slight electrical perturbation splits water into hydrogen and oxygen gas, resulting in diaphanous bubble clouds slowly rising towards the liquid’s surface. Though the founding fathers of electrochemistry posited that the mass of liberated bubbles is directly proportional to the input voltage, certain modes of electrolysis release more energy than is spent. One such mode involves water’s Janus-faced capacity to react as either an acid or a base. Emanating from an array of electrodes at the bottom of a water-filled chamber, strings and strata of hydrogen bubbles meticulously trace their emergent surroundings. A white laser sheet scans and illuminates the hydrogen bubble trajectories. Each quivering bubble-lens divides the white light into its constituent spectrum of colors, thereby inciting enhanced, prismatic depth perception.

Dmitry Gelfand (b.1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (b. 1972, Minsk, Belarus) create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Current findings, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to investigate questions of perception and perpetuity. Such investigations are salient because the scientific picture of the world, which serves as the basis for contemporary thought, still cannot encompass the unrecordable workings of consciousness. Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, Domnitch and Gelfand’s installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these rarely seen phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they often serve to vastly extend the observer’s sensory envelope. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion. In order to engage such ephemeral processes, the artists have collaborated with numerous scientific research facilities (www.portablepalace.com).

Opening performance at the Orangerie: Esther Polak presents #Sandmapping

Esther Polak (b. 1962, The Netherlands) is a visual artist active in new media. With a consistent interest in landscape and in contemporary ways of visualizing space and geography, Polak turned to visualization and mapping as artistic tools, and an integral part of the basic concept of her work (www.polakvanbekkum.com).