A Journey to the Unknown: Material Vision- Silent Reading by Espen Sommer Eide
Friday, February 27, the second day of Sonic Acts. As a part of the conference session A Journey to the Unknown, Norwegian artist Espen Sommer Eide shares own experience of hidden, disconnected places of the word. Material Vision-Silent Reading is an art research project investigating the ways landscape affects human vision. The research was conducted in the Bear Island in the Barents Sea, in conditions of harsh climate and utmost isolation.
In the big cities, at the core of civilization, our senses get adjusted to density of impulses. This environment has shaped human perceptive apparatus upon its own dynamics: the channels of listening and seeing are invaded with great amount of sensation, usually shortly experienced and poorly processed . Alienation, discontinuity of an image and its representation, disembedded space and time are only a consequence of this society of the spectacle.
On the other hand, humans have always longed for the end of the world, as found in our ancestors' expedition diaries. These places are depicted as unknown landscapes and massive realms of nothingness.
Firstly, it was to conquer. Ever after, to explain. Or perhaps, only to isolate oneself.
These spaces made of pure lines and deep perspective and devoid of any objects of attention, how Sommer Eide himself describes them, evoke particular sense of desert, exotic, inhabitable, and eventually: other.
Can this overwhelming experience of being caught in the dark zone of limited comprehension still provoke a critical response; can this kind of human condition remain active?
Certainly, yes.There is a great creative potential, only if an outer spectacle in nature gets internalized as own, deep and unique experience of it. In other words, a spectator is to become his own spectacle.
Espen Sommer Eide talks about life and art coming together in a practice of embodying Arctic expeditions from the past times, reincarnating the explorers gaze. His eye tracking project elaborates the process of visual perception based on two basic eye movements: fixations and saccades. Developing patterns of active spectatorship and connecting a sound to what one is seeing, he makes a creative act of composing with the eyes.
The research evokes an ever actual thought: How does human constitute himself towards the undiscovered, unexplored? First there were only fear and hope. Later, appropriation and projection showed to be inevitable parts of the process, as our mind always aims towards possession.
However, as a matter of fact, the more we discover, the realms of unknown expand bigger.
They call for a mind to suspend, to throw itself to space and time, still creating music.
