Author: kimho_ph4m54

Voyage

Posted 1 month ago by kimho_ph4m54

 

Voyage

Macau (2024)

 

 

 

“The journey
       not the arrival matters.”

T. S. Eliot (1888- 1965)

 

 

Voyage is a site-specific sound installation, featuring on a composition that enacts a traveller’s inner journey. It is presented for the opening of GUIA Experimental Music Festival, Macau, taking place on Oct 11th, 2024.

 

Originally a musique concrète piece, Voyage depicts the soundscape of travelling through a surrealistic compositional approach. With meticulous sound diffusion and spatialisation arrangement based on the surround sound setting on-site, the piece features on interweaving sound sources of trains and cars with other acousmatic sound, including purely synthesised materials and manipulated recording.

 

Time-r

Posted 8 months ago by kimho_ph4m54

 

Time-r

Seelab, The Netherlands (2023)

 

 

 

There is no time. (I was told
today)
What time is it? When shall we meet? How long is I love you forever…
Look at the sun & moon,
dialling day & night.

Time-r: Isn’t a moment uncountable?

 

 

Time-r is an aural installation by Kim Ho & Remco Jongejan, reflecting on the multiplicity of time. In this work, questions on our relationship with time are reframed and pondered, not verbally, but experientially. Communicating through a bodily-oriented experience, this work invites visitors to mind their own time, listen to it at their own pace.

 

As clock-time system becomes pre-dominant in modern social structure, we (when participated in a society) become habitual to arranging life in segments without being aware. Often, time is conceived as a countable object: sometimes a commodity, sometimes a governor of our daily routine. The censorship of time seems out of our hands, while the time in our hands seems like a limited resource, always out of stock.

 

We become a living time-r.

 

Welcome to all (time-rs) who’d like to experience a moment of freedom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photography, Video & Graphic Design: Elina Alekseeva

 

Máni

Posted 1 year ago by kimho_ph4m54

 

Máni

Presented at Den Haag, The Netherlands (2022)

 

 

Máni (2022) is a multi-channel sound piece featuring on the manifold listening experience of Den Haag Seaside,. It was composed for Sounding The Spui Project, specifically as part of Rewire Festival that took place at Den Haag, The Netherlands (2022) .

 

 

Sounding The Spui


Sounding the Spui Project transforms the iconic Spuiplein in the city centre of The Hague into the site of an immersive, sonic experience that channels sounds sourced from The Hague by a variety of composers, sound artists, students and pupils. Participants were asked to record environmental sounds and reflect on questions as: which sounds are typically from The Hague? Which sounds dominate the environment? Which sounds could function as sonic markers to orient oneself through the city?

 

The sonic investigation results in an open-access sound installation in the heart of the city. The work temporarily compressed The Hague’s geography into a single space in the city centre. Various loudspeakers are installed to immerse Spuiplein into other acoustic spaces from the city. All kinds of audience are welcome to experience the installation: invitees and passersby, experts and amateurs, young and old. The presentation took place on 9th-10th April, 2022

  *Please listen with headphones*

 

In-tent-gible

Salbke Wasserturm, Magdeburg, Germany (2022)

 

 

In-tent-gible is a collaborative audio-visual work, with artist Elina Alekseeva. It was presented during the Festival of Future Deserts took place at Salbke Wasserturm, Magdeburg, Germany, 17th-30th October, 2022.

As a sound work, it is a sonic conception of wind across the deserted landscape, signified by the multi-spectacled position of “listenings”. Taking form of a re-imagined aural portray of the landscape by multiplying and reenacting post-produced field-recordings, it is here as an invitation to audiences: to explore one’s own condition of being a listener, questioning the “who” in this constantly exchanging role-play. 

 

Sound recording may be a form of memory, or an act of capturing and materialising reality, yet it can also be a re-discovery of what listening is. Through the varying aural presences of tent, human, and nature, one may navigate in and out the landscape with different situated “ears”—the artist’s, yours, the recorder’s, and after all, the wind’s—and question: Who is listening to the wind?

 

 

 

*Please listen with headphones*

 

 

 

 

Water Time Zone __ Mani-flow

Den Haag, The Netherlands (2022)

 

 

Water Time Zone – Mani-flow is a mani-folded aural installation, taking the “malleability of listening” as a point of departure. Through offering a bodily experience of the inter-changing relationships between the listener, water and sound, it explores human’s prepositional relationship with sound – rather than interpreting sound as an object or a phenomenon, it conceives sound as a process, in which the listener plays an active role to enact it through sounding.

 

Water Time Zone

 

Beginning with Water Time Zone, the concept of time is diffracted into various sonic happenings as perceived in water – both as a source and a medium. Field-recordings of various aquatic forms are the crafter of this installation: ranging from the summer waves of the North Sea to the ice cracking of a nameless frozen lake. These “water sounds” shapes an experiential temporality beyond clock-time system:

lucid, non-linear, changes exist to stay still.

As an omnipresence of life, water encapsulates not only the very impulse of a human-being, but also the seasonal changes, climates, and the circadian cycle of other livehood on this planet. Thanks to the “transformational” essence of water, the marks of life are reflected in the large palette of sonic happenings it inherited from its environment. Water Time Zone offers a multitude of temporal perception through the interpretation of water as a sounding body along the time axis, letting the variety of life rhythms found in aquatic field-recordings sing all at once in this work.

Meanwhile, it is also an invitation for one to listen with full sensitivity and awareness. Presenting water in both physical and immaterial (sonic) forms, it offers an experience that one could “touch” the “water sounds” with any part of the body–be it ears, skin or the mind. Through this tactile sonic interaction, it offers one space to explore oneself with sound – not as an object, nor a medium, but an embodied process. In body terms, it questions: what does water sound like to you? How does it transform when it is listened to and through, with a different preposition to you as a listener?

 

 

Mani-flow

 

After the first listening to/through water in Water Time Zone, one is invited to Mani-flow, where the malleability of listening is explored in the inter-changeable relationship between listener and the listened by a new preposition with water: listen not “to”, “with”, nor “through”– it asks one to listen “within” water, where listening becomes a continuous dialogue between the perceiver and the perceived.

Here, listeners perceive sounds through the conduction of their own body in water, with water-reactive ceramics pieces as another layer of sounding. By unfolding an experience with water as a co-presence, it opens up a refreshing perspective of the relationship in between sound, water and I – sound as perceived through not only our ears or our very skins, but a sounding process that one (I) actively listen with an awareness that one’s body is bathing within the sound of this material presence that constitutes over 80% of their own body.

It is as though silent whisper from one’s own voice: whilst water can be listened to through, within it can simply be listening – wherever “I” am placed upon. 

 

In-Site-Out

Den Haag, The Netherlands (2021)

 

 

  In-Site-Out is an in-situ aural installation that explores our “perception of silence”. By situating oneself in different modes of listening in relation to the site, it intends to uncover where our aural awareness can bring us. It was presented at Amare, the artistic complex located at the heart of Den Haag.

 

  Within the context of listening, silence has long been regarded as an unperceivable entity in our auditory experience due to the physical structure we inhabit. And yet, Silence is the soil of all sounds.

 

In-Site-Out aims to bring out different layers of potential silences — the embodied, the unconceivable, and the imagined. These states of silence are concealed in sounds that were considered “inaudible”. In this installation, by situating one’s body in the multiplying acoustic spaces experienced in one’s heightened self-presence, one is invited to interact with the “inaudible” infra-structure of the site: what is silence is at once sounded; Be it a straight road or spiral.

 

 

 

*Please listen with headphones

Water Time Zone

Den Haag, The Netherlands (2021)

 

 

  Water Time Zone is a sound installation that explores the parameter of time and rhythm from a macro- to micro-scale, signified in the sonic re-production of different bodies of water. Nowadays, we often rely on the different human-oriented systems in perceiving time – whether by a calendar, a clock, or the humming of a song. However, is time really a measurable occurrence as we organise it? Is there a different “time scale” that lies beyond our perception? Visitors are invited to contemplate these questions in this work that offers a temporal perspective of water.

 

 

What time is it water now?  

  Water has run on our planet even before human species existed. Listening to water is a journey into what’s far beyond humanistic time.

Macroscopically, the ocean has roared ashore for billions of years whilst the ice freezes time for biological matter in a single moment, silently; towards a micro-scale, a variety of aquatic forms is a voice of climate and weather—the two timely occurences that govern all livehood on this planet. May it take shape as steam, a lake, or snow, this transformative element is composed through a beautiful sequence of seasonal pulses, like a reading of the climatic score on this spinning globe – giving voice to its immediate surrounding through the dynamic dialogue within them.

 

Water Time Zone

  Through the reproduction and reinterpretation of aquatic field-recordings, Water Time Zone offers a space where the sonic motions of the intimate “time scales” / “pulses” hidden in water transform into a tangible experience for audiences. For its visitors, this work invites one to listen into the micro-movement of aquatic time, both through their bodily engagement with water and with their ears.

The behaviours of aquatic presences are wide yet deep, varying in sonic motion. Listening to water, is to observe and respect what’s beyond one’s ears. This work is blossomed from this little insight gathered through a discovery of aurality within water.

Gratitude to

Justin Bennett, Raviv Ganchrow, Johan van Kreij, Lex van den Broek, Andrejs Poikans, Joep de Jong, Tom van Hooff, Bart Vilex, Fabienne Kramer, Kitty Lai, David Ho, Ian Ho, and the nameless ones who kindly offer their support for this project. 

 

This work would not have been possible without them.

Organisations

The Institute of Sonology & Theatre and Logistic Department of Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag.

 

Photography & Video by Andrejs Poikāns