Soundscapes
Visiting is free of charge
July 19, 2016 – September 19, 2016
Every day 11 am – 7 pm
Closed on public holidays.
Capa Center – Project Room
Curator: Judit Gellér
Exhibiting artists: Cseh Dániel, Csiszár Mátyás – Kovács Zoltán, Martinkó Márk, Nyiri Barbara, Rácmolnár Milán
Photography is a quiet genre, enclosing happenings and stories in itself silently. Content compressed into time stopped can mostly be evoked by remembering. Photography is but a spectacle in assisting us with remembrance, with the evocation and understanding of experiences; from all of our senses, it primarily moves our eyes. In the exhibition Soundscapes, six young intermedia artists attempt to break the silence and transform the images into sounds, activating as such the sense of hearing as well. (Judit Gellér)
Cseh Dániel: Thrasonical, 2013–2016
The spectrogram is a reversible method capable of representing sound waves as images and converting two-dimensional visual information to sound as well. The x-axis is interpreted as the duration of the sound sample, the y-axis stands for the frequency range of the sound, while the luminosity of any point along these axes determines the signal strength.
For this manually corrupted portrait, I needed to switch medium by recording it to reel-to-reel tapes, one colour channel after another. Amplifying the inherent imperfections of a long outdated recording device, I tampered with the moving parts. The slowing tape results in a deeper sound, and hence, in a vertically and horizontally distorted image.
Csiszár Mátyás – Kovács Zoltán: Observer effect, 2016
By taking a photographic image through a multistep transformation process our installation models a particular aesthetic field at the intersection of the photography science history and digital image technology.
Phase One: The reflected light turns into sound.
The digitally created sound (for example music played from a CD) is a merge of 44100 little samples per second. In our installation pixel information of the live-photographed image is being transformed into a short sound sequence. We use pixel information of the image to create each of these sound samples which then come together as a sequence.
Phase Two: The picture converted into sound fills up the exhibition space.
Through the transformation into sound (which has a temporal dimension as it can only unfold with time), the pixels lose their coordinates that locate them in the digital space and instead they are performed linearly and in time. The data stream of visual information coded into sound becomes noise in human perception. By the same token human communication is perceived as noise by the algorhythm that re-creates the picture. The humans and the computers fill each other’s worlds with noise. The acoustics of the exhibition space tempers with the cognitive perception necessary to understand the visual image.
Phase Three: The image of the sounds
The picture is reconstructed based on the captured sound. Thereby, we come to the endpoint of the auditive process that is modelled by us: the visual content mixed with the physical space and consequently reconstructed back into a visual image.
„There is no picture, that could be drawn, computer generated, photographed, or digitally created, that could be a bare passive imaging, but also there is always a constructive cell, that is originated from the pictures atmosphere, and which originates from this spheres history. The reason behind this is that the pictures never really only react visually to the desired objects, but also they contain the history of their origins as well.” Bredekamp, Horst – Farnziska Brons: The Photography as a Medium of Science. In: The Picture in the Age of Media-Art), ed. Edina Nagy, L’Harmattan, Budapest, 2005, 147–166 pp.
Martinkó Márk: City Noise, 2012
The sound environment that surrounds us can be stored visually, so that it can be interpreted as images. The coding method provides a path between different media, thus, it enables a universal interpretation. I prepared a prosthesis for an old digital camera, wherewith it is able to transform the data of an audio signal to visual information without any light. I used city noises for this project from different sources. I connected the audio stream to the circuit of the camera, furthermore, I modified the controller signs of the image processor as well. As a result, the camera took meditative photo objects from a basically annoying phenomenon.
Nyiri Barbara: Soundscape, 2007–2016
I edited the analogue photographs that had been shot in the Harbour of Arhus, Denmark, 2007 into a horizontal composition. While I was creating these artworks the industrial landscape and its reflections formed the visual language of the so-called equaliser that are displaying the sound dynamics. For me, Soundscapes gives the essence of the time I spent in Denmark and in the meantime it creates a kind of musical experience in the perspective of time and memories.
Every sound you hear can be drawn as an image and, vice versa, each image can be formed into sound as well. In the video installation, the ‘sounding’ of images was the aim through a play with the range of frequency, resulting in deeper as well as higher sounds. Today there are many programs we can use to achieve this: to add sound to the image, or to create harmonies beyond noise through different encoding processes, bringing this act to musical foundations. In my video installation I sought to articulate my memories of Denmark as a music experience, looking back at that time of life ten years later.
Rácmolnár Milán: Sculptrum, 2016
The act of hearing consists of perceiving and processing the small vibrations coming from our surroundings. Inanimate objects also react to these vibrations without processing them at all. In my series, I photograph a special medium, induced by sound. This way the medium transforms into a sound sculpture in the picture. The viewer employs the usual visual aesthetics to interpret this phenomenon, which is actually an object reacting to sound, without any background knowledge of this kind of action.