Visiting Practitioner Lecture Series – Åsa Helena Stjerna

While learning about the artist Åsa Helena Stjerna, I noticed the work Earth Song, which is related to earthquakes.

The sounds in the installations are thus directly trigged by the seismic activities taking place at distant places in this very moment. Sometimes as audible bell-sounds , sometimes as pure vibration. In this way, using sound as both audible and tactile experience the work aims at establishing a connection to the vibrational song of our Earth.

https://asastjerna.se/works/earth-song.html

This work reminds me of a sound installation I saw earlier called Is Your Time, exhibited by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani in 2017. This installation also monitors seismic activities in real time and play the piano by the seismic activities.

After encountering a piano in a high school in Natori (Miyagi Prefecture) that was devastated by the tsunami following the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, SAKAMOTO sensed that the forces of nature have retransformed this representative modern musical instrument into a mere object, and from there attempts to retrieve the music by creating occasions for sensing music also in other ways than perceiving physical sounds.