a sonic-essay about erosion, decay & time . a decomposition .
Desert sound is solely based on unedited, raw audio-recordings from the Atacama desert – the driest region on earth.
What do we hear where nobody lives who could listen ?
Recordings of abandoned places, ghosttowns, cementeries, unused saltmines, empty fields, ruins… many of these locations can be found in the nearfield of former industrial areas once set up by copper and nitrate mining-companies. Today these places are relicts, they erose, fade away without any active human influence. Within this process of erosion and decline, it’s nature itself that revives these buildings with an unique acoustic presence.
Due to the Atacama’s extremely low humidity, the atmosphere is very stable during the whole year, which makes it a perfect window for astronomers to observe the universe . From here they are exploring and documenting the past by collecting data from light-sources that might not even exist anymore… data mining? One day these high-tech machines will also cease to be useful, and this giant buildings will one day also become relicts, ruins.
Different layers of experienced realities construct the dramaturgy of Desert Sound. The recordings are not limited only to sonic transmitted in the air (to which we usually refer to as ‘audio’), but also within materials (sand of dunes, saltcrystals, water, var. surfaces), or in different frequency ranges beyond the auditory spectrum (eg. radiowaves).
Desert Sound needs : a dark room, a video/light projection and a multichannel sound system of at least four speakers able to reprodcue a wide dynamic range .
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sound of sand and small pareticals on a dune :
| desert sound is a cooperation of peter kutin, flo kindlinger and the chilenean composer fernando godoy idea : peter kutin concept / production : peter kutin, flo kindlinger, fernando godoy photography : u.m.z. audio recordings : peter kutin, fernando godoy, flo kindlinger used techniques : condenser- & contact-mics, electromagnetic sensors, gps-data-translation-script, hydrophones & vlf antenna support, funding, sponsoring : MA7 cultur vienna, SKE fonds, A9 Land Steiermak, Land Salzburg and Magellan Navigation |
Kutin | Kindlinger 