Skjermbilde fra programmet Currents.
Welcome to a talk about the new art commision for Adressaparken. The talk is co-organized in collaboration with NTNU Artec.
For NTNU’s Artec Residency the artists Mike Leisz and Hannah Mjølsnes are developing the site specific piece Currents, an interactive video work that explores relationships between natural and synthetic environments.
Using Adressaparken as a living database for the daily motion of urban life, the piece transposes the actions of commuters onto the forms of a glacial arm. Framing ice as both a medium that records the passage of time, and one that reshapes itself in the image of its influences, Currents posits a mutual reliance between these worlds. The glacier may appear to us to be standing still, but is really always in a state of slow continuous movement and transformation, outside of a human sense of pace. While it appears solid, its character can be described as something amorphous. In Currents the movement of the glacier; breaking off, melting, freezing, flowing, filing down the surface of the rock underneath it, continuously growing and receding, is transposed onto visual and audio recordings of the glacier itself. A code that inflicts a similar behavior onto the field recordings causes the piece to exist in a state of constant change. The code is activated in response to the movement of the viewer/participant and acts as a bridge between these environments and time scales.
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Hannah Mjølsnes (b. 1987 Naarden, The Netherlands) received her education at The California Institute of the Arts, The Art Academy in Oslo and The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She lives and works in Trondheim. Mjølsnes works with photography, video and sound in installations where natural, digital, and human processes enter into dialogue. Her projects highlight phenomena or species that share an interconnected history with human mythologies. Mjølsnes spends time getting to know her subject and the work is formed through a series of studies. Through her work she creates situations where the viewer can think with and through materials as subjects.
Mike Leisz (b. 1986 Los Angeles, California) holds a Bachelors of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts. He is currently based in Los Angeles. Leisz is a new media artist and programmer who builds dynamic spaces of play and discovery centered around the surprising beauty that results through the hacking, breaking, and mishandling of commonplace technologies.