THRUM
Thrum is a 4-channel sound portrait of an industrial section within Africa’s largest outdoor market, Merkato, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. While being an essential hub for trading, a significant part of Merkato is also based on recycling. This piece is composed of nearby field recordings, extracted from the thrumming ‘iron and metal section,’ where hundreds of men spend all day reshaping oil drums by hammering on them with all their might.
Thrum is part of de Appel curatorial programme: Brace for Impact
Amsterdam, Holland, May 14th
STIGMA is part of the group exhibition Between Realities at Fägfabriken in Stockholm, Sweden: "Five contemporary artists participate in the exhibition Between Realities and in different ways focus upon what it entails to be human in a rapidly changing world. A world where technology is perpetually altering our behaviours and perceptions of the world. Naturally, it is difficult to fully grasp and portray what digitalization will mean for our lives and societies. The constantly connected world creates exciting possibilities as well as practical and philosophical challenges. Is it accurate to say that digitalization alters our perception and that we thus experience the world through a deceptive filter that amplifies, reduces and ultimately distorts? If so, what does that mean? Between Realities presents works by Anna Uddenberg, Jacob Kirkegaard, Wendy McMurdo, Julius von Bismarck and Katja Novitskova that reflect on the technological development and its impact on the future society." STIGMA functions partly in an artistic tradition of nature descriptions, but is multi-layered and moves in between dimensions. With the help of highly sensitive microphones, Kirkegaard has recorded sounds that you cannot hear with the human ear. The sounds add another dimension and layer to the video footage. They change the perception and experience of the landscape and open up for new interpretations. Since the piece was recorded in Fukushima, it is easy to draw connections between the soundtrack and the radioactivity. The radiation is always there but it cannot be seen with your eyes. STIGMA also opens up discussion about the relation between civilisation, nature and humanity. |
Humdrum – a non-event
A sound performance by Jacob Kirkegaard
Humdrum – a non-event
Monday 28 May 2018
Location TBA, Malmö, Sweden
6pm
S!gnal offers a number of return tickets Malmö-Copenhagen on a first come, first served basis.
Contact S!gnal on location for reimbursement.
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Sound and Space Reseah : Resound Kefalonia 2018, May 15 – 21, 2018. Call for participation open now, until March 30, 2018
Following popular demand, we are happy to announce that our next Sound and Space Research will now take place from May 15 to May 21, 2018 in Kefalonia Island, Greece with our partner the Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture.
At Sound and Space Research, we explore aural spatial awareness through the lens of art via of on-site workshops, seminars, discussions, and critiques. Daily activities include collective on-site experiments: action-performance, field recording, video art, drawing, writing, readings and group discussions.
This year's edition "Resound Kefalonia" will focus on Auditory Spatial Awareness and the importance of our attention as a tool for resistance, for awareness to our surroundings, to environmental and social concerns.
Artist and instructor Sandra Volny, Ph.D. will lead the program with our special guest, Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard, who will act as a mentor, present his work and lead an on-site workshop.
The intensive research week will take shape via shared on-site experiments, creative exercises, readings, discussion and a final exhibition in the Ionion Centre for the Arts and Culture’s main gallery in Kefalonia.
For more information and how to apply to Sound and Space Research : Resound Kefalonia 2018.
www.soundandspaceresearch.com
Jacob Kirkegaard will be part in the upcoming 21st Biennale of Sydney "Superposition - Equilibrium & Engagement".
The biennial will show Kirkegaard's work Through the Wall, a large installation consisting of recorded sound from both sides of the Israeli West Bank Barrier – an eight-meter concrete wall also known as the ‘Apartheid wall’. The use of both ambient microphones and vibration sensors placed directly on the concrete surfaces reveal a merging sound environment from both sides of the wall. The installation is constructed as a physical large wall with built-in speakers.
Isfald at the exhibition 33° at David Winton Bell Gallery, Providence USA Building on a history of artists’ exploration of the iconic landscapes of polar regions that dates back to the late nineteenth century, the current crisis of climate change and the associated threat of ice melt and sea level rise have drawn a legion of international artists to Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctic. They travel to document the beauty and the destruction of the region, in hopes of drawing viewers’ attention to the loss that is in the making and eliciting action toward change. 33° presents the work of six artists: Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard and photographers Olaf Otto Becker (German), Camille Seaman (Native American/African American), James Balog (American), Jean de Pomereu (French), and Iain Brownlie Roy (Scottish). Kirkegaard’s forty-minute soundspace Isfald (Icefall) will be on view at the David Winton Bell Gallery, alongside photographs of glaciers, icebergs, and the Greenland icesheet by Becker and Seaman. Photomural by Becker, Seaman, Balog, de Pomereu, and Roy will be displayed on the exterior of buildings across Brown’s campus. 33° is mounted in conjunction with the Brown Arts Initiative’s theme of “Art and Environment,” and coincides with Polar Opposites, a BAI symposium, and Writing on Water, a program of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. 33° is produced by the David Winton Bell Gallery and the Public Art Committee with generous support from an anonymous donor and the Brown Arts initiative. |
Fridman Gallery proudly presents the first solo exhibition in the United States by Jacob Kirkegaard Black Metal Square #1 (2017) is a free-hanging one-square-meter black metal plate whose subtle natural vibrations are amplified and fed back into itself, enhancing the readymade resonance. The sound sculpture references Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and the astronomer Robert Fludd’s early 17th century drawing of a black square inscribed with the phrase et sic in infinitum (and so on to infinity). What does the Black Square sound like? Ice Age (2016) is a pair of photographs of spectacular glaciers in Greenland where Kirkegaard made field recordings of melting ice. In one of the pictures, we see a hydrophone cable disappearing into a hole in the glacier, which resembles an eye staring back at us. The hydrophone is listening deep inside the glacier, eavesdropping on an otherwise inaccessible and dangerous space. Presented alongside the photographs is Melt, a composition of those field recordings, a sonic image of constant flow and change, and of human actions affecting the surrounding world. Hotel Chernobyl (2006) is a series of photographs taken inside the only hotel existing inside the Zone of Exclusion in Chernobyl, Ukraine. The images of barren interiors, filled only with 1980s furniture and dim halogen light, resonate with the conspicuous absence of human bodies. Accompanying the photographs is Aion, an audio-visual work recorded and filmed in the Zone. |
Jacob Kirkegaard & Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
Descending
Descending is a composition consisting of two movements for room resonance, triangles, shakers and horns.
The recording was made in August 2015, performed by the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra.
This record marks Løkkegaard's and Kirkegaard's first collaboration.
Soon out on Important Records!
T r a n s m i s s i o n The work consists of seismic vibration recordings of the ambient resonance of rock arches from around Native American Tribal lands in Utah and Arizona, combined with above ground acoustic recordings from the same places. Transmission will be resonating up through the Fairchild Atrium at the ECOLAB (Department of Geography at Dartmouth College), a tall and slender architecture made of raw concrete. Its ambience is quiet and students utilize nearby spaces. Transmission - a signal that is broadcast or sent out. Or something that is passed on. Whereas our surroundings above the earth’s surface mostly relate to the present, archaeologists and geologists utilize the spaces beneath our feet to study the past. Combining these above and below ground spaces can be experienced as deep time listening – in the present. Our geological spaces are dark, dense and slow. They contain, hide or reveal past events, long forgotten, unknown or ignored parts of our lives and history. But the obscured past can also be found in the human subconsciousness, reflecting Native American anthropomorphism of natural features - in particular Rainbow Bridge. During his field trip, Kirkegaard also studied the natural light in its surroundings. Inspired from the areas surrounding the different arches, Transmission will include slowly shifting tones of light in subtle colors. The seismic vibration data were recorded by geoscientist Jeffrey Moore and geophysics graduate student Paul Geimer from the Department of Geology & Geophysics at the University of Utah. During April 2017, Jacob Kirkegaard joined Dr. Moore and Mr. Geimer on a field trip through Utah and Arizona gathering seismic data and acoustic recordings. Thanks to Jeff Moore, Paul Geimer, Erik Stanfield |
TIME IS LOCAL Time is Local is a study of sound in time and space - a tribute to the individual perception of the moment of now. We like We and Jacob Kirkegaard selected twelve different chambers within the ground floor of the museum. The ambient sound of each chamber was recorded and then played back into chambers while being recorded at the same time again. Layering each chamber's own ambient sound multiple times slowly evoked and revealed their unique handful of tones. These 'chamber chords' were then interpreted for instruments. Time is Local is a performance and installation consisting of live instrumental interpretations of the resonant frequencies of the museum as well as the resonance recordings of each chamber which are played through a multichannel system of 12 speakers. The speakers are placed in the twelve selected chambers among its twenty four ground floor chambers. “We aim to understand the resonance of the location – the sound of the Museum, so to speak – to allow the move from each chamber’s evoked, idiosyncratic sound to an overall compositional interpretation. To create the piece from the acoustics present, pre-recorded material and live music. Using the evocations as the foundation for the composition, the chance to work and interact with the location during the process has enabled the quintet to scrutinize the dogmas of the work. Effectively experimenting with the initiated ideas of sound in time and space regarding transfers, position, coincidence, and movement, the performance is an invitation to enter an organic, multidimensional, yet personal investigation of the sound of the Museum." |
Video by Mik Stampe Fogh & Jonas Fogh
Imaginary West Indies 2017 is the centenary of the sale of Denmark’s former slave colony known as the Danish West Indies. To mark the occasion, Jacob Kirkegaard and Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard have created a sound installation using audio recordings from the islands to portray an imagined ‘Paradise Lost’. The sound artists and composers Jacob Kirkegaard and Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard are both renowned for their ability to convert sound into a form with the character of an artwork and a bodily dimension that can be experienced by more than the ears alone. In his art, Jacob Kirkegaard uses acoustic phenomena that are usually either overheard or inaudible to the human ear. Using a range of sensors and recording methods, the material unfolds in compositions and spatial, visual and sound works. Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s art focuses on the multiplication of sound, extending it beyond its usual boundaries to re-emerge in new forms, as well as on the creation of imaginary musical works that the listener has to envisage before their inner ear. Here the two artists have joined forces to follow in the footsteps of tourist brochures to the former colony in the US Virgin Islands, making Vestindiske Forestillinger (‘West Indian Imaginings’) an expression of Danish post-colonial consciousness 2017. Despite heightened awareness of Denmark’s past as a colonial power, Danish travel agencies continue to sell a romanticised version of Denmark’s former colony. Whereas European nations like Germany and France have used the names Namibia and Vietnam instead of their former colonial designations for years, the former colony on the Virgin Islands is still referred to as ‘the Danish West Indies’ in Denmark, something 10,000 Danish tourists travel across the Atlantic every year to experience. But what is it that appeals to Danish tourists? Is it the climate, food and beaches? Or is it the dream of ‘Paradise Lost’? Nostalgia for something that could still be Danish today – if only it had not been sold. The sound work is presented in a room bathed in green light, reminiscent of the green screens used to locate people and events in an imaginary film context. The use of this green light reflects the artists’ aim of locating the listener against an impossible background, or a background made possible solely via the listener’s subjective fantasy – a range of ‘realities’ that unfold in the imagination of the individual listener. |
S i g n a l s
4-channel sound work created for Code Art Fair in Copenhagen, that portrays the sound of early digital and coded communication.
The work utilizes recordings of military morse code used to transmit classified communication between warships and naval bases.
Morse code is a method of transmitting text information as a series of on-off tones in sequences of short and long signals called "dots"
and "dashes. It was developed in 1837 and was used for early radio communication, before it was possible to transmit voice.
Live @ Art Bar, Papirøen, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2nd
Eustachia for Voice The SOAEs used for this composition were recorded and collected by Kirkegaard from the ears of members of the Danish choir Aarhus Pigekor All 'ear chords' were recorded, filtered, analyzed, and then interpreted for voices. This choral work connects two intimate organs of our body: the ear and the voice. The ears are the composers, the voices perform the tones emitted by the ears. Composed by Jacob Kirkegaard with voice arrangement and supervision by Katinka Fogh Vindelev.
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ARC
Carl Th Dreyer: The Passion of Joan of Arc (silent film, 1928)
Film screening with live soundtrack by Jacob Kirkegaard (Originally composed for Onasis Culture Center, Athens, Greece, 2014)
Also performing is Katinka Fogh Vindelev with her new work 'A Voice in a Voice in a Voice in a Voice'
Koncertkirken, Copenhagen, Feb 3, 2017
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Jacob Kirkegaard is part of the Aki Aora artist residency in Tulum, Mexico, where he'll be creating a new underwater sound installation portraying the surrounding Cenotes. January 2017
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 SPOR - Jacob Kirkegaard Med afsæt i feltoptagelser og fotos fra Jacob Kirkegaards mange rejser, dvæler spor ved et udvalg af råmateriale indsamlet mellem 2005 og 2015. Optagelserne var aldrig tiltænkt de værker, som rejserne tog udgangspunkt i, men i stedet intuitivt indsamlet. STEMMEMØNSTRE - Katinka Fogh Vindelev Med en forkærlighed for tritonus, også kaldet djævlens interval, og tilfældige elektronisk genererede arpeggiomønstre, har Katinka Fogh Vindelev skabt en håndfuld nye stemmestykker komponeret med samples af hendes egen stemme. Christianshavns Beboerhus, København d. 14 decdember 2016 |
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Sound recordings of melting ice for Dries van Noten Summer 2017 Women's Collection fashion show in Paris, September 28th, 2016 |
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Jacob Kirkegaard | Sabulation : MATTER013 DVD−excerpt from mAtter on Vimeo. |
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Tilt The John Madejski Fine Rooms, Royal Academy of Arts Director, Camera, Sound, Edit: Clara Jo
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 E U S T A C H I A - for Two Voices
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PAST:
A R C Holotype Editions is pleased to present a new work by acclaimed sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard. Arc was originally commissioned for INMUTE ’14 as a soundtrack to Carl Th. Dreyer's silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). In this new edit, running to just under 36 minutes, Kirkegaard’s refined mastery of tone unfolds in two arc-shaped tracks dedicated to the LP format. In his score, Kirkegaard fragments and stretches music from Joan's time, aiming to expose the mystically charged atmosphere that could simultaneously declare Joan of Arc a visionary and a heretic. The outcome is an immersive score of prolonged choral-like harmonies that evolve slowly, constantly shifting between darkness and light. Arc lives in moments of transition, embracing the subtle ambiguities that were so difficult for the English clerics to understand and yet so pliable in Joan's flexible mind. Perhaps it is what shade sounds like, or perhaps it is a meditative resonance on the brilliance and terror of thought. Arc is an unfolding of nebulous sound that emerges to the surface when time is suspended. Arc comes in a limited edition of 300 copies, mastered by Nikos Lavdas at Kiwi and pressed on 140gram black vinyl at Optimal. Cover artwork designed by We Are Still Bold & Beautiful.
UNTITLED (BLACK METAL SQUARE) 100 years after Kazimir Malevich painted Black Square (1915), Jacob Kirkegaard brings the square to life with sound. Untitled (Black Metal Square) is a freely hanging black metal plate whose natural vibrations are amplified and circulated back into themselves to generate resonances.
Centuries of artists have tried to express the nothing through blackness. Untitled (Black Metal Square) evokes Malevich's famous quote “It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins." Robert Fludd also attempted to express this feeling in his 1617 drawing of a black square. In his work the edges are inscribed with the phrase "et sic in Infinitum" (and like this to infinity) and function like gates that frame a passage to emptiness. To enter the blackness is to experience the potency of a primordial universe before creation. Kirkegaard poses the question, "and once we enter, what do we hear?"
The project takes the work of seventeenth century alchemist and scientist Athanasius Kircher as inspiration. Kircher was a polymath and inventor, who researched fields as diverse as medicine and Egyptology, and designed and constructed wondrous sound and vision automatons. These included a collection of so called speaking statues whose spiral mouths would lead out into the streets of Rome like giant trumpets. In this way the speaking trumpets or ‘hearing lens’ would reveal the cacophony of Rome to the listener. London Subterraneous aims to link Kircher’s ‘speaking trumpets’ with his fascination of geology and underground reverberations and find a way to explore London’s mundus subterraneous. “Although these stink pipes are nowadays "useless" this work aims to reveal them as poles of sound, or as singing flutes. In a way these are tones from the past.” Jacob Kirkegaard
I S F A L D Jacob Kirkegaard's work ISFALD (Courtesy LOUISIANA - Museum of Modern Art, Denmark) is part of J.F. Willumsens Museum's exhibition NATURMØDER. Among the other artists participating in this exhibition are Astrid Kruse Jensen, Dark Matters, Ditte Knus Tønnesen, Ebbe Stub Wittrup, Eske Kath, Eva Koch, John Kørner, Nikolaj Howalt, Olafur Eliasson and Tal R
B U D A Live and as sound installation at Mørke Dage i Aalborg, Denmark, October 23rd
D E S C E N D I N G Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard & Kirkegaard have joined forced creating their first collaboration. LIGHTS/ DESCENDING is a work for 13 horns.
Great Gifts Of Chance
R E C O L L E C T I O N RECOLLECTION Kamal Aljafari Trailer from aljafari films on Vimeo. Germany · 2015 · DCP · Color and Black & White · 70' · o.v. no dialogue
This film consists of footage appropriated from Israeli fiction films shot in Jaffa
Artist in residency in Greece: Euripus Strait - Jacob Kirkegaard
Exhibitions
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AION (DVD)
H A U S D E R M A H R E
KW Institute for Contemporary Art
Thursday, March 18, 2010, 7pm
R E W I N D
A new sound piece created on commission for soundwalk.com
Will be online by mid February 2010.
S P E C U L U M S P E C U L I
Commissioned by Deutschlandradio Kultur © 2009
Jacob Kirkegaard is featured with a two-page interview (By Anne Hilde Neset) in the July 09 issue of The Wire magazine