The artistic research project «Turbulent Currents» deals with the ambivalent, sonically fascinating but sometimes distressing experience with architectures and landscapes of energy production – topologies that are all to some extent non-places in the sense of being uninhabitable, often gated and even dangerous zones. But at the same time these territories are of great importance for society and thus classified as critical infrastructures. The project seeks to capture and investigate our growing energy-dependent existence in the Anthropocene through listening and sound composing. This way it aims to bring afore the existence of such non-places that humans continue to create in times of growing electrification of society. Thus, the project examines how a wider knowledge of and a deeper sensibility towards these infrastructural topologies and networks can be gained through artistic exploration, practice and experimentation with sound.
«Turbulent Currents» aims to develop electroacoustic compositions that echo the multisensory experience of infrastructural landscapes of electricity production and artistically explores their own logic of organization of time and space. To implement this, the project follows a two-fold methodological approach: field research in power plants and research in the studio with sounds created by analog modular synthesizers. By exploring infrastructures such as windfarms, run-of-the-river power plants, pumped storage dams, tidal power facilities or thermal power stations, field research follows the respective flowing more-than-human forces such as water, heat, wind, steam that are turned into electricity. An array of various microphone types and sensor technologies will be used to capture the soundscapes of infrastructural architectures and networks which enable an extended auditory perception of energy conversion.
In addition to field research, the work in the studio shall deepen the perceptual explorations of the ways electricity producing machines, flowing of energies and the respective architectural and territorial structures sonically articulate. To echo the experience in the field, the infrastructural soundscapes are further explored by creating, shaping and sculpting sound with an analog modular synthesizer. This way, the compositions not only seek to reference on-site experience through soundscape recordings but also include the direct transformation of pure electricity into a sensory graspable, sonic existence through a musical instrument. The insights of the artistic research process will be shared through different sonic formats such as acousmatic multichannel compositions, installations, and live performances.