(hu)Man in a horizon – Waveland(scape) was inspired by the sight of the lake ‘Reflections Lake’, the surrounding landscape is reflected in the (still) water, and the name given to this lake.
The human tendency to (re)interpreted and give names to lakes and landscapes, and the way those bordering water take on a mirror image through their reflection in the water, thus resembling (sound) waves. Rendered as audible textures that retain the memory of their own reflection. In Waveland, the scene does not only display; it sings the form of it’s reflected landscape.
This led to an exploration of how landscapes, the horizon and the coastline can be (re)interpreted by humans as reflections and, by extension, as sound waves. To this day, humans remain the only beings on this planet capable of (re)interpreting everything around us, including nature and landscapes. Anyway, do animals (re)interpreted and see reflections, mirrored landscapes?
Where land and water meet, a constant interplay of reflections unfolds – refracted light, silhouettes, the landscape reflected. Where people and landscape meet, (re)interpretations arise; this visual mirror effect – the reflection of the landscape on the horizon – is here (re)interpreted through a successive series of video-to-audio computations, rendered as directly as possible, in pure, raw sound waves.
The decision to keep the computations, the conversion from video to audio, and the final sound as pure and raw as possible stems from the idea of keeping the (re)interpretation as directly and close as possible to the natural visual form of that particular landscape.
The working procedure is as follows:
- – One photograph is selected from a collection of landscape photographs bordering ‘still’ water, and which are therefore mirrored.
- – This selected photograph is loaded into a self-developed software (Max/MSP/Jitter) and undergoes a series of computations that are as direct and pure as possible:
- – The resulting image, which already resembles a sound wave, is converted into a sound wave as directly and purely as possible.
- – This sound wave is then scanned from left to right as directly and purely as possible, and converted into raw audio that is played back.
This work exists in two forms:
- – As a real-time video to audio installation with a regularly changing landscape.
- – As a rendering of this real-time installation in a series of short videos, as you can see below.
- – This series of short videos can then be played on one large screen or several smaller screens.
(hu)Man in a horizon – Waveland(scape): “Reflections Lake”, Palmer, Alaska
Audio/Video specifications:
- short video in loop
- video format: FHD 1920×1080, H.264, MPEG4
- duration: 16 sec
- audio: sample rate 48000, stereo (2 channel)
- original image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lago_de_las_Reflexiones,_Palmer,_Alaska,_Estados_Unidos,_2017-08-22,_DD_12-19_PAN.jpg
(hu)Man in a horizon – Waveland(scape): “Salar de Uyuni”, Potosí, Bolivia
Audio/Video specifications:
- short video in loop
- video format: FHD 1920×1080, H.264, MPEG4
- duration: 12 sec
- audio: sample rate 48000, stereo (2 channel)
- original image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salar_de_Uyuni,_Bolivia,_2016-02-04,_DD_10-12_HDR.JPG
Some other example landscapes images with corresponding audio waves:
