Magnetoceptica

Magnetoception: a sense which allows an organism to detect a magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude or location. Using the name Magnetoceptica, sound artist Dewi de Vree and costume designer Patrizia Ruthensteiner create performances and installations in which atenna-based costumes pick up electromagnetic fields and translate them into electronic sounds.

Using everything from bent hazelnut rods, bamboo stems to a recycled spinning wheel, de Vree and Ruthensteiner combine odd, imaginative objects with open electronics. Copper wire is wound into different patterns and part of the costume, really tying together the electronic and the physical.

The sounds picked up with the antenna depends on the location of the performers: they can modulate it by changing their position and moving in relation to the space and each other.

The different costumes have their own qualities, such as the Omega Birch (above) is inspired by and made of Baltic birch, which is the most sought after wood in the manufacturing of speaker cabinets, compensating for the roll-off of low and high frequencies on speakers, evening the tone. The Spherics Harp (fragment below) is inspired by Qing Dynasty’s tremendous hairdos and is able to receive subtle signals from up high, bouncing against the ionosphere (below).

Dolmen

During this year’s Sonic Acts, one of the installations that stuck with me was Mario de Vega’s DOLMEN. It hung in the main hall of the Muziekgebouw and made a whole lot of noise.

Consisting of various high frequency receivers, radio scanners and custom electronics based on logarithmic detectors, it is an intervention that explores the boundaries of human perception as well as the social, political and physical impact of telecommunications technnology by making wireless signals in space audible. If you stood below it, making a call, you could hear the normally inaudible carrier wave being amplified by de Vega’s installation. In that way it was also kind of semi-interactive, and made one really aware of all the different signals we surround ourselves with. Not only the waves of cellular phones were audible, also the carrier waves of the radios of the ships floating by.