LAND-ING

DEC
2018
TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes
Santa Cruz, Tenerife
LAND-ING - Tape Reconstruction
​LAND-ING is a sound installation by Barbara Held and Daniel Neumann that was developed exclusively from recordings they had made interacting with the landscape of the island Tenerife. For several days they undertook field trips to seek out acoustically interesting terrains and places. At those sites Held used her flute and flute-like instruments, and Neumann played test tones (pink noise, sine waves etc.) to articulate specific acoustic phenomena and to sonically relate to the land. Landscape becomes something very different when approached from an aural perspective.

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landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld

The project was part of a series curated by Juan Matos Capote called “Prácticas Territoriales” and shown at TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (Santa Cruz, Dec 2018). The multi-channel installation became a new acoustic place, algorithmically meandering through the different recordings and different places.

soundart installation

Above is the installation playback patch, programmed in Max/MSP (Thanks to Matthew Ostrowki for the archtecture!). The playback has multiple randomizations built in. It always starts with a composed space that is made from recordings from a single location. Over time, it then randomly introduces recordings from other locations and drifts more and more into a randomized, layered, mixed field. Then after a drifting period of 2 - 11 minutes, the patch crossfades into a new single location, also randomly selected, stays there and then starts drifting again. So only the starting “scenes” from a singular location are composed, the rest will always recombine materials with endless variation.  

Below are a series of images from the different locations we recorded at::

landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld teide
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld cuevaroja
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld loscampitos
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld arcodetajao
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld arcodetajao
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld teide
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld cuevadelviento
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld teide
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld teide

Two workshops - 1) Soundscape and Field Recording and 2) Spatial Sound Composition - were part of the pubilc program at TEA.
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld workshop
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld workshop
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld workshop
landing sound installation TEA danielneumann barbaraheld workshop

About the series Prácticas Territoriales (visitantes con oídos)
Territorial Practices (visitors with ears), a series of interventions by foreign sound artists on the island of Tenerife
Curated by Juan Matos-Capote

There is a great tradition of important travelers who have come to the island of Tenerife to do research of the territory based solely or predominantly on sight. In “Prácticas Territoriales”, the invited artists visited the island and carried out research through listening -- in contrast to vision-centric models of interpretation and artistic production. Sound was an important element, both as a generator of meanings and as a purely acoustic phenomenon. The series encompassed works that had sound as well as works —or parts of works— that did not have sound although they were based on listening. 

Sound is fleeting. It is temporary, it is not stable. It has a beginning and an end. It is impossible to capture. In acoustic terms it is characterized by its envelope, that is, by an attack, a decay, a sustain and a release. It comes, it grows, it develops and it goes away. Traditionally, visitors would get a sense of simultaneity, permanence and objectivity, that was knowledge, through sight. Participating artists reflected in their works the characteristics of transience, relativity and contingency of sound, and in their aural experience of the island spaces, they worked with ideas of strangeness or the unknown, of the other or of the periphery, of the errant or of the migrant, of the subjectivity or of the personal, and isolation or lack of communication. The artists took, with their ears, the role of the traveler or the visitor, the foreigner or the stranger.

During 2018, every four months an artist or pair of artists came to the island for a period of 14 days. Participating artists had to create the work in situ, on the island, in collaboration with local communities or elements that make up the island. Thus, the process was an important factor. The invited artists were Anna Raimondo, who collaborated with an heterogeneous group of women in the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the creation of the installation based on urban geography and gender perspectives; Brandon LaBelle who collaborated with a group of performers throughout the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, adopting different strategies, listening and moving, and becoming another figure, a strange one, on the streets; and Barbara Held and Daniel Neumann who collaborated with the landscape, traveling to different acoustically interesting places throughout the island and creating sound interactions, in a manner of an active conversation from both sides. 


The file list for the patch::