johansons.info

This is one of the renderings we did in the beginning of the year.

“Recorded Altitudes” is an attempt to capture experience of a city form an unusual perspective: hundreds of meters above the ground. The first of the series took place in Riga, May 2007. The images and sounds collected during this journey will be presented at the Urbanologic exhibition organized by LCCA in Andrejsala. The exhibition is open for public for the a whole month between 31/05/2007 and 01/07/2007. Take a look at the project’s online documentation and some photos of the process! Next of the project series will be carried out in the city of Rotterdam and elsewhere around the world. Stay tuned!

“Although urban environment produces a rich variety of noisy artifacts of different origins, the propagation of the sound on the horizontal plane is restricted by the shapes of architectural structures. The sounds mostly spread out through the grid structure of the streets and are never heard altogether, as in open field.

As there are no barriers on the vertical, “Recorded altitudes” attempts to elevate the listening position high above the street level. Eventually, there are no objects blocking the radiation of sound and sensitive microphones register the acoustic panorama of the city in its totality.

To capture the rare listening experience, unmanned meteorological balloons that are used to serve in atmospheric explorations are equipped with recorders and sent out to float over the city skyline.

After the journey, they return back to earth and expose the contents of their “black boxes”: recordings of sounds and images.”

Voldemars Johansons (2007)

The composition is a five channel piece for authentic public address sirens. The sirens are mounted across the perimeter of a large resonant space, enveloping the room by spatialization of sound.

ALERT 05 is a blend of composition and installation, in memory of the great uprising of 1905 in Riga. The composition is played on authentic public address rupor speakers GR-1E that used to blast lo-fi propaganda through minds of soviet people. The communication of signal to speakers is carried out by radio broadcast. The composition is dedicated to the revolutionary movements in society, technology and culture of the beginning of the last century. The children of the industrial revolution – the proletarian class demand new kind of art, that opposed to the decadent decay of bourgeois culture, is accessible to everyone: clear and simple as commissar’s speech, powerful and direct as sounds of heavy-industry machinery, shots fired form the cruiser Aurora.

The Installation was premiered on Sept 2005 at Forest of Sound festival, (http://www.skanumezs.lv) in abandoned factory building in Riga.