Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway have worked together since the early 1990’s, developing large scale performances, multimedia installations and site-specific work, usually in collaboration with organizations and experts across many specialized fields. In their work they have sought to transform aspects of cultural and technical history, which typically remains below the level of everyday consciousness, into a shared experience of open possibilities. They have an interest in how visual language, technological interfaces and aesthetic form can impact on collective processes, and thereby open up new processes of inquiry; and the wider potential and impact of these processes on society. Their recent work has explored uranium mining in Greenland (Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld, 2017) visualizations of the world’s financial markets (Black Shoals; Dark Matter Stock Market Planetarium 2015/16) and real climate data (Most Blue Skies 2009), In 2013 they developed Foghorn Requiem, a requiem for disappearing sound, performed by the Souter Lighthouse foghorn, three brass bands and fifty ships out in the North Sea.  Lise Autogena is a Danish visual artist and a Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Art at The Cultural Communication and Computing Research Institute (C3RI) at Sheffield Hallam University. www.autogena.org

Foghorn Requiem: Image of Souter Lighthouse near Newcastle
Credit: Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway: Souter Lighthouse

JKG: I am absolutely fascinated by your Souter lighthouse project in the northeast of England. It engages community and animates a public in a way that captures a sense of place, identity while also being quite fun, and engaging.

Joshua Portway: Yes. Foghorn Requiem was commissioned by the National Trust to make a piece of work about this lighthouse, near Newcastle. It was the first electric powered lighthouse in the world and when we were commissioned I think they expected us to make a piece about the lighthouse itself. But when we went there we talked to all the volunteers who had restored the lighthouse and they all had these amazing stories about it. And one of the stories in particular really moved me, from an engineer who had spent his life working on ships and when he retired he dedicated himself to restoring the lighthouse and the foghorn to working condition. At the time of his story, he had got the foghorn working again but it still didn’t sound like he remembered it from his childhood growing up in the area. He just couldn’t work out what was wrong, but one night he was lying in bed, reading a book about foghorns at 3 in the morning, and he read about this thing called the grunt of the foghorn, when the air stops and the sound drops several octaves. He realized his foghorn wasn’t doing that, so he jumped out of bed and drove to the lighthouse and tinkered around with the foghorn and at about 6 in the morning he thought he’d fixed it and couldn’t resist trying it out. About fifteen minutes later he got a text on his phone from a childhood friend of his – a fisherman out at sea – that just said: “I hear you finally got it right”. We realised that the sound of the foghorn seemed to be particularly associated with memory and melancholy and became much more interested in the foghorn than the lighthouse itself. We asked him to play the foghorn for us – and it was an extraordinary experience. Standing next to a foghorn when it goes off is a viscerally thrilling thing – we worked with it for months, and even after all that time I still would have the urge to run as soon as it was played – it’s so loud that you can actually feel yourself vibrating in sympathy with it. But when I first heard it I was shocked at how different it sounded to my memory of hearing foghorns as a child. I grew up in a fishing village, and my memory of foghorns was a very soft, distant, almost plaintive sound that seemed to come from infinitely far away. Up close it sounds incredibly brassy and rough – like a really rude trumpet!

JKG:  And what was that difference?

JP: The difference was the sound you generally associate with a foghorn – the soft, distant, melancholic one – is basically the sound of the landscape. What you’re hearing is that brassy sound reflected and echoed and refracted by millions of elements in the landscape. The sound is completely reshaped by the landscape it passes over, and when you hear it, it’s been kind of smeared out in time, and it contains the shape of the landscape encoded within it. It’s almost unique in that respect because other than explosions there are very few sounds as loud as a foghorn. We’re not used to hearing sound so much affected by the landscape.

JKG: So, the conception crystallized…

JP: We loved this idea of the intimate connection between the sound and the landscape, and the sound and memory and the history of the place. And we decided we wanted to make a piece of music that incorporated this sense of space and the sound of the landscape into the music itself. We’d never made a piece of music before, but it seemed right for the context. There are these gigantic 4-metre high air tanks in the lighthouse that power the foghorn – we got the volunteers to just play the horn until the the tanks were completely empty – which for some reason they’d never tried before. It sounded amazing – as the airflow slows down it goes though this amazing series of strange resonant phases where the two horns beat against each other and create weird animalistic, guttural sounds like the death throes of some enormous creature. It was very moving, and we decided we wanted this sound as a climax for the music.

Map. (copyright Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway)

JKG: And was the local community part of what made you arrive at an idea of how you were going to approach the project?

Lise Autogena: Yes. We realized that Trinity House – who are the organisation that runs all of the lighthouses in the country – were in the process of closing down the foghorns because boats have GPS satellite tracking systems now. No one really needs foghorns anymore. But it was just quietly happening – no one really knew about it. And when we talked to people about it they became very upset – people have a real emotional connection with the foghorns. We also were interested in the recent history of northeast England, which was traditionally a shipbuilding and mining area, but during the Thatcher years all of that heavy industry collapsed and left the region with a profound loss of identity (as well as, obviously, being an economic catastrophe). We came up with this rather insane idea of trying to make a requiem for the foghorn – and through that a sort of acknowledgement of the industrial past that the foghorns represented. We had a crazy idea of ships out at sea performing in gratitude for the years of service of the lighthouse and the foghorn. And we ended up with a plan for a piece of music that would be performed by fifty ships on the North Sea, three brass bands and the two lighthouse foghorns. That became a year’s work. This is the place with the most shipwrecks in the UK, which didn’t help – it’s really dangerous to gather so many ships into such a small area under the best of conditions. So, we spent months planning it – using a nearby maritime training facility that had a ship simulator. The simulator allowed us to recreate the landscape and position the ships that formed our orchestra and see what they would look like and how they would perform under different conditions.

JP: Because we wanted the ships to actually play music in concert with the brass bands we realised we had a problem – the ships were up to a couple of miles off shore and sound takes several seconds to travel that far, so they would ordinarily be completely out of time with the band. So we had to design a system which ended up with us building special microcomputers to control the horns at sea. These controllers had gps modules on them and were getting updates about wind speed and humidity etc. and continually calculating how long the sound would take to travel from their position to the shore, then they would offset the musical score and play the notes the appropriate amount of time beforehand so that the sound arrived exactly in time with the band.

A REQUIEM FOR THE FOGHORN, PERFORMED BY SEVENTY FIVE BRASS PLAYERS, A FOGHORN AND AN ARMADA OF SHIPS
Ships horns from an armada of vessels off-shore, seventy five brass players on-shore and the Souter Lighthouse Foghorn performed a Foghorn Requiem, an ambitious musical performance to mark the disappearance of the sound of the foghorn from the UK’s coastal landscape.
Conducted and controlled from a distance, ships at sea sounded their horns to a musical score, that will took into account landscape and the physical distance of sound. The performance took place by Souter Light House by South Shields, UK with thousands of spectators and more than 50 ships off-shore. (Photographer is Kristian Buus, 2013)

We realised we couldn’t actually write the music ourselves, so we searched for a composer who we thought would be able to compose with this sense of space in mind, and we found a composer called Orlando Gough, who was brilliant and brought a lot of great energy to the project. In addition, Lise had to recruit all of the ships – who were initially very sceptical of the project and convince the harbour master and the brass bands and entire communities of people. It took a lot of people to make it work on the day. There’s actually a filmed interview with me shortly after the performance, and I’m actually crying – partly because I was utterly exhausted, but mainly because I was also so moved by how people had come together to make the project happen – people we had never met before had come in, with almost no notice, and worked for 48 hours with no sleep to help me do a last minute rebuilding of part of the controller, for instance. This whole piece of work was created by the people of the North-East, and it would not have worked at all without these people.

A REQUIEM FOR THE FOGHORN, PERFORMED BY SEVENTY FIVE BRASS PLAYERS, A FOGHORN AND AN ARMADA OF SHIPS (Photographer is Kristian Buus, 2013)

JKG: Some economists have described the stock market, indeed investment in general as irrational, even animalistic, and its so-called science as ridiculous, short sighted and resource ridiculous. Your project Black Shoals presented a kind of planetarium experience with a dome above the viewers head reflecting stock market activity, and bioforms eating into the schema. What inspired the project and how was it received?

JP: Black Shoals was a piece we first worked on in the late nineties. It was a time when the stock market was booming – the beginning of the bloom of the more complex types of financial instruments that ended up precipitating the 2008 crash. These more complex derivative trading products moved the stock market ever further away from any connection with the physical world of blood and labour. If you read something like wired magazine in those days it was full of excited articles talking about this strange transcendence. It was also the beginning of the age of what we now call “big data” and we were interested in the aesthetics of data itself, in the strangely seductive power of vast oceans of information and the experience of the sublime that it engenders. So Black Shoals was a response to these things.

Black Shoals; Dark Matter, 2015
Somerset House in London
Photo: Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway

The piece itself is a large dome (about 5m diameter) that hangs above the heads of the viewer. In the dome are projected thousands of stars which glimmer and pulse, and amongst the stars are these sort-of creatures, little single-celled organisms that wriggle around. Every star in the sky represents a stock traded on the world’s stock exchanges, and the latest versions of the piece have almost every publicly traded company in the world up there. The system is connected in real time, via Reuter’s superfast data network, to the stock exchanges – and when a company’s shares are traded the corresponding star in the dome will glow momentarily slightly brighter – the strength of the glow depending on the size of the trade. This happens within milliseconds of the trade taking place. So, if you stand under the dome and look up at the stars you’re seeing a significant proportion of all the money in the world moving around, in real time. If you see a little star flash momentarily, that’s probably several million dollars of trading taking place. It’s a strange experience – on the one hand you have a sense of power, being able to see all the world in a single glance – but on the other hand, trying to comprehend the scale and complexity of what you’re looking at is profoundly overwhelming, almost terrifying. It’s a feeling of vertigo – you feel tiny and powerless and insignificant. So, we were interested in how systems like the global financial system and our new technologies, can produce this seductive paralysis.

At the same time, one of the reasons that there was so much excitement about the markets in those days was that it was the time that complexity theory and mathematical models of biological processes were starting to enter the public consciousness, and of course the financial markets are an interesting thing to study in those terms. People were applying theories that had been derived from biology to the financial market with great success. Now, there’s nothing wrong with studying the markets using this approach, but it tends to lend more and more subconscious weight to the sense that the financial system is somehow a “natural” process that we can study the same way we study other natural processes. But of course, the markets are very specifically a system that we have created and perform in a very formalized way – there’s nothing “natural” about them. The creatures that exist in the dome are, in part, a sort of joke about that. They’re actually pretty sophisticated artificial life forms, composed of neural network brains and physically modeled bodies made of muscles, joints, bones eyes, noses etc. They’re based on the work of a brilliant researcher that we worked with called Cefn Hoyle. Whenever the exhibition is installed the creatures are reset, and initially start out as a kind of chaotic primordial soup of body parts – they aren’t really coherent creatures at all. But the creatures can breed with each other, and those that survive longer get to breed more, so evolutionary processes take hold and quite soon you start to get creatures capable of moving around, grazing amongst the stars. Later on more complex creatures sometimes evolve that actively hunt for food, sniffing out areas where the most trading is taking place. Just like in nature you get different species with different survival strategies – sometimes you’ll get very simple “fungi” like creatures that can’t really move but which will reproduce in their thousands when they can and throw their spores out – most of the spores just die, but some might land on an active star and they will furiously reproduce – sometimes creating huge blooms that swarm across the sky. Other species only have a few offspring, but they are much more complex and will actively look for food and a much higher proportion survive and they tend to live much longer (though these are often the first to die in lean times).

We saw this evolution of the creatures as a kind of poetic attempt to understand and adapt to the weird world they lived in. We imagined that the creatures, with their primitive neural network brains, might develop something like a religion to explain why suddenly Glaxo-Smith-Kline was so fertile, and why at other times a great famine might fall upon the whole petrochemical region. There are a lot of references in Black Shoals to this kind of magical thinking about money – for instance, over time the stars move about in the dome and form constellations reminiscent of the signs of the zodiac. Just as early people looked to the stars, and felt they had some magical connection with their lives, we look to the iconic companies like Apple and we monitor their waxing and waning and try to predict the future harvest. Money is a powerful magical tool. In our opinion language is at the root of our idea of magic, because language has the ability to create something out of nothing (for instance in the act of naming we make something that previously had no identity into a tangible *thing* that we can talk about). We create something in a similar way whenever we give it a price – suddenly it becomes part of a market and exists in a world where it can live in a way that it couldn’t before – now it can be traded and become part of the flow of capital. All of these slightly strange ideas about “nature” and our relation to it, and our relation to the financial market, are reflected in Black Shoals. It’s a bit of a dense piece of work, possibly too dense.

It’s interesting how Black Shoals has been received. I think that, partly because it is so dense, it means different things to different people. It’s not didactic about trying to make its point – in fact it’s very much a research piece for us, we’re still thinking about it and reworking it and trying to understand it ourselves. And the world changes – so we’ve adapted it over time to reflect that, and our relationship with it has changed too. Even people that work in the financial world often find their own meanings in it – we had some people who felt very strongly that the creatures represented predatory high frequency traders, and that’s OK. Thomson Reuters who have supported the project for years have been very positive about the project, even though they know it’s somewhat critical of their world – which is very impressive of them. (In fact, when it’s running Black Shoals is by far their biggest consumer of data – amazingly it consumes about three times as much bandwidth as a major stockbroker; when we showed it in Copenhagen the demand was so high that Reuters had to upgrade the network connection of the Copenhagen stock exchange to cope – so their commitment to the project is not insignificant). Other people have written about the project in relation to evolutionary theory and to its role as a critique of the aesthetics of data visualization, and we’re always interested to read these different interpretations.

Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld – copyright Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, 2016

JKG: I come from a country where uranium mining has had devastating effects on the health of indigenous and local communities, both from mining, and the detritus of mining. I found your Greenland project and film ‘Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld’ to be of great interest, particularly as the Danish government has actively worked against letting Greenlanders take over their own country for resource and exploration reasons. Can you tell me more….

LA: Well, the situation in Greenland is really complex, and in some ways our film is our reaction to the difficulty of taking a position in relation to the situation as people who stand, at least somewhat, outside. When we first set out to make the film I think we had much more certainty of our position than when we finished. The Greenlander’s desire for independence is understandable, and their culture is incredible and unique and is undermined somewhat by their colonial relationship with Denmark. But on the otherhand they live in an impossible country, and unless they are prepared to go back to a primarily hunting existence it’s very hard to see how they can build a viable economy. They are 56000 people, spread out over a vast area (50 times the size of Denmark) the vast majority of it uninhabitable, with almost no infrastructure, and very very little land suitable for agriculture. At the moment they are tremendously subsidized by Denmark. And so the only way they can see to produce foreign trade (beyond their fishing industry, which is struggling to cope already) is to sell their mineral rights. But our feeling is that, compared to the rapacious savagery of international capital and the implacable pressure of global geopolitics, the Danes are going to look quite benign. It’s hard to see how the country and culture would survive the sudden influx of mining money, or how they could protect themselves legally (and possibly even militarily) from outside forces so enormously much more powerful. Shenghe Holdings – the Chinese mining company who have shown in interest in the mine featured in the film – have an annual income greater than the GDP of Greenland – how can Greenland hope to protect their interests? To be fair, many Greenlanders realize this, but the reality of politics in Greenland are that nationalism and the fervour for independence wins votes, and once in power the government has to try to find ways to deliver. One of the things we felt during the making of the film was that it was important for Greenlanders to develop their own systems of debate and decision making. We heard from many people that they felt that European style democracy wasn’t culturally natural to them – several people in the film talk about how hard it is for them to disagree in public, for instance, which makes civic debate very difficult. We’ve heard about some older traditions of debating and dispute resolution which might be adapted to help, and it would be interesting to see if that might work.

Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld – copyright Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, 2016

Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld – copyright Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, 2016

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Description of the film:

The film is about the debate surrounding the development of a mine at near Narsaq, in the southern tip of Greenland. It’s an amazingly beautiful area, and the only region of Greenland that can currently support any form of agriculture (climate change may make a difference in the future). There have been sheep farms in the region since the 1920s, and the farming industry has grown slowly since then and now there are about 20000 sheep there. There’s also a history of fishing in the area, but the fishing industry has declined in recent years and the prawn factory closed. As with many places in Greenland, young people are moving away to Nuuk or to Denmark.

A couple of kilometers outside the town is a geological wonder – the mountain of Kuannersuit, also known as Kvanefjeld, has one of the richest seams of rare earth minerals in the world, and also huge quantities of uranium and thorium. There are minerals in the mountain found nowhere else on earth. It’s become the centre of the debate about the future of the country. Some people in the area feel that a mine would bring money and jobs and revive a town which otherwise is doomed to fade away – others think it will pollute the air and water with radioactive dust and an influx of foreign workers will destroy their culture entirely. It’s a very emotional issue which has divided the population of the town, and it feels like it’s at the heart of the debate about the future of Greenland, and in some ways emblematic of broad questions about the future generally.

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https://www.autogena.org/

Art, Creativity, Culture, Ecology, Sculpture