Although this isn’t strictly a sound installation as its method of presentation is not in-person but rather stereo capture, I decided to make a note of it because of it’s interesting usage of space. On top of this, it was produced during 2020 which means that the decision to present it as a work of documentation rather than an in-person event may have been related to pandemic life. Anyway, on to the piece.
Seliverstov is toying with ideas around re-amping field recordings in different spaces. He takes several field recordings of oceans and birds and plays them from various tape machines – mostly microcassette dictaphones – which are then recorded by his 4-mic array. He shuffles around the dictaphones over time to ‘compose’ the work, creating dynamics and curating the spatial positioning of each recording.
I think that works like this have a lot of potential to be reapplied to a gallery space. Sound sources can be moved within a space independently of the listener, perhaps by suspending them and using large fans to spin speakers, perhaps by placing them on a turntable, or model railway.
If you refer to Seliverstrov’s Instagram account (linked below, embed function wasn’t playing ball) you can see that he has continued to expand on this work, collaborating with another sound artist to create ‘birds’ out of Buchla modular synths and then working those recordings into his explorations of space. All very applicable to a gallery space I feel, although I’m unsure what the artistic message behind this is.