The project developed as part of Artist-in-Residence programs
Soundreaming is an audio-visual art project from the artists, Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko. Inspired by location, experience and memory and motivated by the inversion of the traditional roles of photography and sound in the media and art worlds, Soundreaming emphasizes the importance of the acoustic environment on our memory and perception of place. Soundscapes replace photography as the dominant documentary element at the core of the artistic practice. The visual representation is directly inspired by the audio documentation of the locations featured in the archive. Moreover, this technique allows for the transparency of environmental sound to shape the audience’s perception of the artwork and in turn, allows the visual component of the composition more freedom to express itself.
To help the memory, we usually focus on the things that make sound – a guitar, a telephone, a motor vehicle, whatever – rather than sounds themselves. And the things that make sound usually give sounds their name. In the West we generally have no words that name sounds specifically. There is no word for the sound made by a guitar or a telephone or a motor vehicle, so we have to refer to the object that produced the sound to give the sound a name. And, because of this, people do not talk about sounds, they talk about objects that make sounds; they talk about ‘things’ and, consequently, sounds cease to be sounds and they become things.
Beyond the production and output of sound there is the role of the listener. I have always been fascinated by the role of human perception. I am aware that different people will make sense of the same experience in different ways. Furthermore, the same person may make sense of the same material presented at different times in different ways. This illustrates the role of the human brain as a receptacle of music and the mind as a transforming force via subjective perception.
In music and sound art, places and spaces are most often perceived through the prism of acoustics or phonographically captured sound-objects, which are then compiled into field recording compositions or soundscape compositions. However, we can also find more abstract, post-conceptual approaches here. Soundreaming belongs to this area. The project constitutes sound dreams on the one hand, but on the other hand reamed sounds, as a kind of dream woven from audio material that has been radically processed.
The sound material here is created through a loop of mutual artistic translations by Jacek Doroszenko and Ewa Doroszenko, an artistic duo. Firstly, field recordings and preliminary sound materials are created, which are then interpreted into visual works, which are later reinterpreted as graphic scores.
This is a collage narrative based around the sounds of a non-existent place, suspended between field recordings captured during the Artist-in-Residence stay in Linz, as well as the different ways in which they are individually perceived and mediatized. The individual pieces are sonic aural after-images of places, or perhaps after-hearings, which are, after all, two different things. Perhaps they should be thought of as post-field compositions.
