Åsa Helena Stjerna  (born 1970 in Stockholm) is a Swedish artist using sound and listening as her artistic modes of exploration. Through her site-specific installations, she explores sound’s potential, making the embedded conditions and underlying narratives connected to a situation perceivable, drawing connections between past and present, local and global, as well as human and more-than human. By this she seeks to reframe the act of listening, evoking a sensibility of places as complex ecologies.

Also active as artistic researcher, she has been specifically interested in exploring the contemporary conditions of sonic situated practice and its ability of being transformative, i.e. what it actually means “to make a difference” in the era of Antrophocene and advanced capitalism. Guided by methodologies of  feminism, ecosophy and posthumanism she proposes an understanding of site-specificity as an aesthetic–ethical practice  and engagement between specific and diverse “bodies” with agencies—human as well as non-human, spanning across and connecting the material, social, discursive, artistic, and technical realms at the same time in a given situation

Post humanism

Human, non-human

Neglected

Mono Chanel work in a dried out well : not about sight specifics, not installing – it’s experimental practice which has to be invented again and again, you can’t repeat it

Representational approach to sound – expectations of how piece should spend like (commercialisation of art)

Investigate the practice, 

Engagement with the site during process – transversity

Making the effective lines

Establishing new connections (the artistic design process)

Becoming non-autonomous (the role of the artist object)

Sound – work – space ——  this idea has to be questioned 

DO we need more artists working with environmental issues (specifically ocean) ? 

Ionosphere, diurnal tide

Sonification – transferring inaudioble data into sound  – 

problem with artistic sonification – mere translation -CRITIC: taking away the complexity of sound, perfect condition of translation, filtering the process, making it idealised, authenticity

Unitary narrative

Hidden knowledge : politics, possibilities, what commissioners don’t know about

Potential of technology – data as a representation of the specific moments in space

What she’s working with:

ATOMIC CLOCK

SUPER COLLIDER

RESONATOR 

Batumetry – echolocation

Passive sonars – hydrophones

Active sonars – echolocation technology; sound Beemers attached to the bottoms of the vessels – sending sound signals and record the echo

As you said, we live in a visual world. Do you think that sound can transform the way people are perceiving environmental (and other) issues? Do you think the connection through the sound is more intimate and reaches deeper than the visual medium?