Auroral Synapse Book

Anna Hill Auroral Synapse

This publication has been made possible with the generous support of the Irish Arts Council Published by Space Synapse Ltd November 2003

Auroral Synapse

The photographs in this volume were first shown as part of an interactive film and photographic sound installation at Grennam Mill, Thomastown during the Kilkenny Arts Festival in August 2003. The premier showing used two spatialized sound fields; one accompanying the Hassleblad photographs seen here, sharing the Earth bound experience of my journey and the other, accompanying the Celestial encounter with the auroras, as I experienced under an Arctic sky. I am grateful to have collaborated with the talented Iarla O’Lionaird on the sound composition as well as the highly creative and generous Lappish Finns who I met along my journey. Through Auroral Synapse, I seek to re-address the interconnectedness of life, death and celestial events through sensory perception, interaction and emotion.

Anna Hill October 2004

This book is dedicated with love to my brother John Hill, my sister Kate Hill and my mother Claire Hill who keep me searching.

A journey to light

By Robert Monroe

Anna Hill set out on an expedition to Finnish Lapland in March 2003 in order to photograph, film and record the phenomena of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, and to explore various subjective, indigenous, and scientific responses to this great natural display. This was an archetypal northern journey - towards insight, towards light in darkness - with isolation, clarity and cold along the way. The tangible bounties of this journey include the fine photographs presented in this volume, as well as a BAFTA-nominated interactive installation first exhibited at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in the summer of 2003.

language is called “audible light.” In the installation, as well, the breathing of audience members, transmitted by contact microphones, interacts with images of the aurora as they are projected onto a curve of suspended fabric. The brightness and proximity of the projected images varies according to the patterns of breathing. This aspect of audience participation brings together both a space bioengineering breath sensor, and folkloric accounts of indigenous people singing and whistling to the auroras to bring them closer. The exhibit thus reunites human scale with celestial scope, sound with light, and science with folklore.

Both these photographs and the installation sustain significant paradoxes. Technology and art, nature and culture, the local and the cosmic are all contained within images that transmit not only clarity and coolness, but also warmth and delight. The vast power of the northern lights is met by an imagination at once deft, delicate and playful.

Not so much a recreation as a simulacrum, the installation produces an environment in which the audience is invited to participate in several sensory experiences at once. Included are images of the aurora borealis moving above the forested horizons as projected on the wall and curvilinear veil, the human and natural sounds animating the space, and kinesthetic patterns created by the movement of viewers through the veiled space. One of nature’s great multimedia shows - the northern lights - is referenced through the economical use of a few materials, carefully focused, that combine to offer opportunities for a flowing, changing synesthesia. Using gentle, evanescent, and inviting contours and textures, the piece delivers the essentials that Wallace Stevens postulated for the contemporary artwork: it is abstract, it gives pleasure, and it changes.

The northern lights occur when ions streaming from the sun, in what is called “the solar wind,” are drawn down by the earth’s magnetic field and collide with ionospheric gases, causing the particles to glow. Hill’s work not only registers these powerful micropartical collisions, but is itself a luminous product of meetings between different elements. With admirable subtlety, Auroral Synapse weaves a diverse set of artistic, scientific and observational perspectives into a unified whole. The installation soundscape combines the music of Iarla O’Lionaird, which is inspired by the Sean-nós tradition, with low frequency radio wave recordings from the Sodankyla Observatory. At this observatory Hill worked with Esa Turunen, a geophysicist who has argued for the audibility of the aurora borealis, a phenomenon which in the Sami

Synesthesia, a synergy of the senses, can be considered a subjective mirror to the Pythagorean idea that various phenomena of the objective world - geometry, numbers, and music - have a common creative source and pattern, audible in the music of the spheres; or, perhaps, in the “audible light” of the aurora borealis.

By inviting a synesthetic response, Hill’s work stimulates the viewer to wonder about a possible unity behind the various physical phenomena which the senses are registering. This artwork thus recapitulates on its own scale an effect of nature; for people through the millennia have been inspired to wonder by the aurora borealis, and indeed indigenous cultures around the arctic have reverenced the northern lights as prime creations of the spirit world. The vast spaces and far horizons of the northern environment, visible in these photographs, may lead even a modernized viewer to consider the elements which make up the globe as a whole, and their possible confluence in some primal harmony, of which the lights seem to offer a glimpse. Apparently simple, at first glance, Hill’s photographs in fact reach boldly for the elemental materials of the created world: light and darkness, earth and sky, and the geometries of lines, globes, and curves, composed within a perfect shape - the square frame of the medium-format Hasselblad camera. Light in these works is both subject, that which is seen, and the condition for seeing - the “master light of all our seeing,” as Wordsworth described the imagination. Light, the most spiritualized of the four elements, takes almost tangible form in the green bars and curves of the auroras, which snake among the other elements of air, earth, and (often frozen) water. The ethereal is understood in terms of the earth, and the earth is seen as animated by celestial light. This meeting of different elements occurs within a sphere implied by the emphatically curved horizons of the earth, in photos taken with a fish eye lens. Shape, it seems, is in the relativistic eye of the beholder. For these dramatic curves of light and land remind us that, since Einstein, we understand

that space and light rays are not rectilinear but curvilinear, bending around objects of matter - such as, for instance, planets. The planetary unity of the earth’s globe is invoked by the curvature in these photos, a unity that connotes the psychic wholeness which Jung associated with the circle; yet the completion of the circle lies tantalizingly beyond the square of the frame. Implied completions and presences are everywhere in these photos - in the two empty chairs, for instance, which are suspended between terrestrial and celestial fires in one of the collection’s most unforgettable images. In exploring absence, this artist also explores loss, communal and personal, and her familial losses are recalled. With unusual delicacy, this work fulfills Anna Hill’s stated intention: “to re-address the interconnectedness of life, death and celestial events through sensory perception, interaction and emotion.” Working with the elemental materials of the created world, she reminds us of the correspondences between material and ethereal, part and whole, and nature, imagination, and the seeing eye. The beauty of these images is visceral, with their green visitations and snow-swept horizons, but the connections they make are subtle. Like the aurora borealis itself, Auroral Synapse is a work of connections at once small and grand, moving from the micro-informational level of the brain synapse, with all its lightning-connective power, to the cosmic connectedness of the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” that unites geometry, astronomy, sound and optics. The modality of the synapse runs all through the varied encounters within Hill’s project; brief energetic exchanges with people or sites produce a system of lasting meanings and connections. These carefully ordered compositions are not without

tensions. A dog jumps against a fence which the lens has turned spherical, as if nature were imprisoned by the Cartesian grid we’ve placed on our globe. A radio tower dwarfs a vertically aspiring tree. Green light ignites beside a school at twilight. And yet, the quidities and oddities of a particular setting, with its huskies, fences, frozen lakes, observatories, wooden churches and snow-mobile tracks, are seen as points connected within a larger whole. Looking into Auroral Synapse we realize that the northern lights are a primeval “sound and light show” of vast scale and delicate subtlety. We see, too, that Hill’s work represents a suitably holistic yet technologically informed response to the range of atmospheric, terrestrial, and human events in and around this “audible light.” Happily, the creativity represented by Auroral Synapse has fed into further projects which do not diminish but in fact extend the impressive scope seen here. Space Synapse Systems, under Hill’s direction, is developing an interactive artwork, called The Symbiotic Sphere, which will allow those aboard the International Space Station to interact with terrestrial participants. As a whole Anna Hill’s work maps extreme and therefore revelatory positions within a human dream of global inclusiveness, the conceptual frontiers of which range from the nearness of breath, through the unique qualities of regions like Finnish Lapland, to the grand stage of the night sky upon which the eloquent drama of the aurora borealis unfolds.

- Robert Monroe

1M / 1M Lamada prints mounted on aluminum dybond. Shot with fish eye Hassleblad lens, Finnish Lapland, March 2003 A spatialized soundtrack of ambient field recordings, low radio frequencies from the Earth’s upper atmosphere, Kantele, slide guitar, vocals and harmonica recorded in Lapland accompanied these images.

Auroral Arch Kopello, Lapland.

3rd March 2003

Preceding pages

Kopello Village School Lapland by night.

5th March 2003

School Husky Kopello, Lapland.

7th March 2003

Village road Kopello, Lapland.

7th March 2003

Previous pages

Ivalo school playground Lapland by night.

Ivalo school Lapland by night.

8th March 2003

8th March 2003

Communications Tower Lake Inaari, Lapland.

10th March 2003

Frozen river with radar Sodankyla, Lapland.

13th March 2003

Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory-radar Sodankyla, Lapland.

13th March 2003

Aurora and stars Sodankyla, Lapland.

16th March 2003

Preceding pages

Sixteenth Century Church Sodankyla, Lapland.

New grave, Sodankyla Churchyard Sodankyla, Lapland.

17th March 2003

Fire on frozen river Sodankyla, Lapland.

17th March 2003

The Remote Auroral Suit

Artist as receiver and transmitter

“The Remote Auroral Suit” is an interactive performance piece, a prototype outfit inspired by my research and development at Sodankyla Geo-physical Observatory.

> Wireless Satellite communications for transfer of Bio-medical and environmental atmospheric data to interactive art and design scenarios.

The suit is a hybrid receiver and transmitter for use in remote Arctic regions. The suit will amplify aurora (upper atmosphere) sounds and transmit them wirelessly to interactive art and design scenarios.

> Benefits to public- creates access to science data, technology transfer, increased environmental awareness and experiential intimacy with remote experiences through interactive art

I developed the idea in response to reconsidering how the saturation of technology may act as a double edge sword as we gradually loose our perceptual and sensorial ranges through urbanisation and development.

> The Remote Suit is suppor ted by an Irish Ar ts Council Special Projects Grant 2005 and the European Space Agency > The work in progress was presented at the Tate Modern at “user_mode” an International Symposium on emotion and intuition in interactive art and design in May 2003

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/user_mode.htm

Lyrics to Foxes Fire

The Interactive Installation at Grennam Mill

There is no place Stream or thorn, No matter how remote No fold of rock, Whether north south east or west That from us is not born.

Through this artwork I set out to explore subjective, intuitive and indigenous responses to celestial phenomena. A combination of anthropology of place, scientific insight into the auroras and local creativity and folklore is explored. An interactive contact mic connects the audience’s breath with the visual output of the aurora. This aspect of the audience participation was based on the folklore that I was told in Koppelo of singing and whistling to the auroras to bring the spirits closer.

Though Africa’s heart may seem afar And the moon1s reach distant to our touch, Yet we are of them and they, They are of us.

9th to 17th August, 2003

Interaction shot and Interaction installation photographs:

Auroral Synapse in collaboration with Iarla O’Lionaird (Realworld Records)

Interaction and spatial sound design consultancy Jason Bruges and Martyn Ware

Kilkenny Arts Festival Grennam Mill, Thomastown, Co Kilkenny Ireland. Saturday 9th to 17th August, 2003

Thanks to: Lapland Arts Council, Irish Arts Council, Esa Trunen Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory, Mark Szasy, camera man.

There is no winged creature Moth, fly or bee, Nor even the insane man In the valley of sadness; That we should not sit with And by sitting understand.

Inspired by “Ni Ceadmhach Neamh Shuim” by Sean O Riordain. Translation and re-working by Iarla O Lionaird

The Journey

The trip began as my quest to document and experience the “Northern Lights”. Together with video cameraman Mark Szassy, I travelled to Finnish Lapland in the Arctic Circle to become enraptured by the small community of Koppelo where I’d been given a residency in the village school. Here during sub-zero nights, we waited on the frozen river with barking dogs and moonlight accompaniment. We experienced the first aurora “crown” on the third night. I felt as if I was being sucked upwards towards the night sky by it’s radiating crown of light. I felt transported momentarily into a Blake painting by the perceptual overload. It was an immensely humbling yet uplifting experience.

Village life mutated into a less enchanted ‘Grimms Brothers’ scene and the rural idyll of sleighing children and snowladen purity was overshadowed by an attempted murder. On the fourth day, Kopello became a national crime scene and police flew up from Helsinki to investigate the charred house in the wood. Perceptions of place transformed and puppies and playgrounds took on sinister proportions. This was the end of a long dark winter of twenty four hour darkness and it was taking it’s toll. I travelled with a fish eyed Hasselblad, forensically freezing time and becoming intimately adjoined to its simple mechanisms. Counting pink elephants with frozen fingers and tripod poised on the icy permafrost - sipping vodka to alleviate the chill; such was the nocturnal Koppelo routine.

By day, impromptu interviews and conversations opened up the inner psyche of Kopello through music, folklore and song. The local Kantelee player Marti Sala, a master of his art-an ancient instrument of Russian descent, played his own compositions in his forest home. Discovering he is also an artist, he invited us down to the local hospital to see his “Room for saying goodbye” a symbolic display of precious stones and stained glass in the morgue. Helli, daughter of the reindeer farmer “sings to the aurora” in the school gym in the twilight blueness of dusk. She has an exquisitely melancholic yet innocent voice. Vessa Torma, the Country and Western schoolteacher plays the slide guitar and the soundtrack takes shape: comic, beautiful and mysterious.

Next stop following a danzling sunlit bus ride across the snow is Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory where I ‘d made plans to meet Esa Trunen, a scientist investigating geo magnetic sounds associated with the aurora. Indigenous communities through out the Arctic Circle have folklore describing the aurora “singing and whistling” as it approaches Earth. Science to date has been dismissive on the basis of no “evidence”. Dr. Esa Turunen, Head of the Aeronomy Division at Sodankyla has an exceptional passion for his research and a collaboration is born. The aurora finally arrives in a tantalising display on the last night at Sodankyla. Wrapped up in six layers of thermals

and a balaclava, I test out my silver “interactive” tin foil suit - a template inspired by conversations with Esa and ideas of receiving ,transmitting and amplifying the sounds of the aurora. It is a long exhilarating night, exhausted yet satisfied, the fire burns a slow hole through the ice that ruptures and rumbles beneath us.

Artists Biog Anna Hill is a Dublin based interactive artist working with medical and astronomical science. She studied fine art sculpture at Saint Martins, the National College of Art and Design Dublin as an exchange student and the Royal College of Art London. She continued her practice whilst working with children’s play schemes, a contract with women’s aid and art therapy work with mental health at the Studio Upstairs, the Diorama Centre, London. Born in London, Hill has now been resident in Dublin for four years, working as an artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and at the Fire Station Artists Studios who provided her with the support to initiate both the Space Synapse and Auroral Synapse projects. In 2003 she established Space Synapse Ltd, a high potential start-up company based at the Digital Depot in the Digital Hub, Dublin. The company’s focus is Cultural Space research, making the human experience of Space travel widely available and relevant to life on Earth through interactive art and design, education and outreach. The first contract was successfully completed in May 2004: a preliminary analysis for an interactive artwork for the Columbus Module of the International Space Station. Hill is currently working developing a Post Doctoral research base and trans national partnerships for Space Synapse Ltd and continues her work as a practicing artist.

www.spacesynapse.com

Publication: This publication has been made possible with the support of the Irish Arts Council Published by Space Synapse Ltd Essay by Robert Monroe Designed & Produced by Image Now Sponsored by Image Now Production assistance: Sadhbh McCarthy Research and Development trip: The Lapland Arts Council The Irish Arts Council Travel and Mobility The Fire Station Artsists Studios Dublin Jussi Ängeslevä, Equipment and local knowledge Mark Szazsy, video cameraman Esa Trunen, Sodankyla Observatory Henna Harri and Helena Törmä - Lapland Arts Council For the production of Auroral Synapse: A special thanks to my creative audio collaborator Iarla O’Lionaird For Sound & Interaction design consultancy: Martyn Ware of Illustrious and Jason Bruges Brian McDonald, Simon Mc Mahon, editor, Headfirst Post Production Facilities, Mat Wardle, Phillip Ryan

Education: 1999 Royal College of Art London MA Fine Art Sculpture 1990 Central / Saint Martins School of Art London: BA Hons Fine Art Sculpture 1989 NCAD Dublin School of Art & Design, Ireland: Exchange student Solo exhibitions: 2003 Auroral Synapse in collaboration with Iarla O’Lionaird The Kilkenny Arts Festival, Ireland 1999 Foetal Space MA Fine Art show at the Royal College of Art, London 1997 View from Within at the Project Arts Centre Dublin 1996 Still Like Dust I Rise ,The City Arts Centre Dublin 1996 Still Like Dust I Rise ,Saint Bartholomew the Great, London EC1 1992 Images After Life, Kingsgate Gallery London Selected Group exhibitions: 2004 Auroral Synapse artwork at the Royal Institution London, UK “The Future of Sound Part Two “ 2004 Exhibit 6 at the Digital Hub, Dublin, Ireland 2000 Radio Halo : artists working on the theme of astronomy at Jodrell Bank Science Centre UK 1999 Nerve Systems Institute of Contemporary Art London, UK 1999 Multiples Temple Bar Gallery Dublin 1999 Jibby Beane’s Articultural Show Southbank, London 1998 Blackout-an Exhibition of Light Art London 1998 Artists Using Photography BA Executive Lounge London Awards/honours 2005 Special Projects Arts Council of Ireland 2004 Shortlist prize for Central Bank Competition for the design of a Euro Coin to commemorate the Irish Mathematician Hamilton 2004 Arts council of Ireland publications award 2004 BAFTA Interactive Committee 2003 Cultural Relations Committee award for presentation at International Astronautical Congress, Vancouver Canada October 2004 2004 ESTEC workshop supported by the European Space Agency, Leonardo/Olats, The Ours Foundation and the International Academy of Astronautics 2003 British Academy of Film and Television nominated Auroral Synapse for an interactive BAFTA award in the category of best “interactive art installation” 2003 Arts Council of Ireland travel grant. 2003 Enterprise Ireland Incubation Unit at the Digital Hub 2003 Lapland Arts Council Residency 2003 European Space Agency Contract. 1999 RCA MA Thesis On Mind and Matter: Towards a new consciousness Awarded commendation 1997 Research trip to Arizona USA to visit Light Artist James Turrell Sponsored by British Airways 1996 Royal College of Art (MA) Bursary Symposiums / Conferences 2004 Presentation at Synergies and Signatures Symposium, Cork, Ireland 2004 Presentation at The Royal Institution London “The Future of Sound Part Two “ 2004 Paper and Presentation at the Sights and Sounds of Space Session International Astronautics Congress Vancouver, Canada

“Auroral Synapse” Soundtrack Featuring location recordings from Lapland Special thanks to: Heli Huovinen, Martti Salo and Vesa Törmä. Esa Turunen at Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, Mark Szaszy “Foxes Fire” Soundtrack Written and performed by Iarla O‘Lionaird Published by Real World Music Ltd. Featuring Location recordings by Anna Hill 3D spatialized by Martyn Ware and Tim Scott for Illustrious Iarla O’Lionaird appears courtesy of Real World Records Ltd / Virgin Records Ltd. Thanks to: Esa Turunen at Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory. Barrow-nore-suir rural development Ltd. “Line 6” music equipment, Pol Brennan, Ciaran Lynch AUDIO CD with print and credits Published by Space Synapse Ltd The Digital Depot, The Digital Hub, Thomas Street, Dublin 8 Ireland Auroral Synapse Copyright Anna Hill 2003 Iarla O’Lionaird / Realworld 2003 Essay copyright Robert Monroe 2004

2004 Presentation at Trondheim Electronic Arts Center Innovation Festival, Norway 2004 Paper and presentation to the 7th Space & Arts workshop “Space : Science Technology and the Arts” at ESTEC, the Space Research and Technology Center, European Space Agency, Noordwijk, Holland. 2003 Presentation at “the Future of Sound Part One” BAFTA Piccadilly, London 2003 Presentation at The Tate Modern, London User_ Mode: an International Symposium on Interactive art and Design 2002 Breakout Session at Art Science 2002 ASCI Conference, New York, U.S.A. 2002 Presentation at “RADICAL “Creative Europe and European Creatives Saint Martins School of Art London UK 2002 Presentation of work at ISCAN -Irish Science Centres Awareness Networka conference on the science / arts interface, Dublin Ireland 1999 Presentation “Know Thyself-Art and Science of the human body” Oxford University UK European Science Foundation Committee for the Humanities hosted by Artakt 1999 Presentation to UK Art /Space Forum, Lux Centre London UK Selected press and bibliography: 2004 Crossings Paper- Space Synapse Systems- for the Electronic Journal of Art and Technology Published by the University of Dublin Ireland 2004 Irish Tatler “The Artisan-North Star” feature profile by Ella Mc Sweeney 2004 “Future tense” RTE Radio One Feature interview. A special edition on the interface between science and art. 2004 New Architecture magazine -Papadakis Publishers Feature by Marcos Lutyens 2003 “Cream of Kikenny Arts Festival “ by Aiden Dunne The Irish Times 2003 “Rattlebag” Arts Program- National radio feature-RTE1 Interview 2003 “Northern Lightshow” by Marianne Hartigan -Music and Visual Art Feature The Sunday Tribune 2000 “Spectacular Bodies-The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now” Hayward Gallery publication Reference : Foetalspace in essay by Marina Wallace. 2000 “Strange and Charmed-Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts” Gulbenkian Foundation Publication Chapter by Ken Arnold “Between Explanation and Inspiration “ 2000 The Guardian ‘Radio Halo 1999 The Independent RCA Show ‘Foetalspace’ with photograph by Peter Macdiarmid 1997 Sunday Tribune art review by Aiden Dunne 1997 Catalogue essay by Roger Malbert (View From Within) 1996 Family Tree, Independent Magazine Feature by Anne McHardy and David Modell Selected work experience 2004/2003 Project Director and CEO Space Synapse Ltd Dublin Ireland 2003 Visiting Lecturer, Media Department, Lapland University Finland 2003 Irish Museum of Modern Art- Artists Panel Dublin Ireland 2003 Visiting Lecturer, MA Contemporary Visual Arts, Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall, U.K. 2002 Associate Researcher, SMARTLAB at Central Saint Martins 2002 Artistic Consultant with The Design Laboratory @ Central Saint Martins, Centre of the Cell Project, London Alsop Architects 2001 Visiting Lecturer Limerick College of Art, Sculpture BA 2001 Concepts for Interactive Artwork for the Afro Celt Sound System World Tour Contract with Realworld Records.

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