Creating site specific installations with Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm

In this interview, Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm is talking about the creation of a site-specific installation called The Receiver. His works explore our sensory perception and the limitations of our senses. His pieces are often site-specific.

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Highlights

• 0:00:00 Prototyping site-specific work

• 0:00:51 Description of the "The Receiver" installation and its sensory experience

• 0:03:12 How the space for the installation was chosen

• 0:06:25 The process of levelling up and down the frequencies in the silo

• 0:07:08 Collaboration with Bang Olufsen

• 0:09:18 Challenges of planning and prototyping the installation

• 0:11:48 The messy process of refining the concept and technology

• 0:15:55 Overcoming safety and logistical challenges

• 0:18:21 Advice for working with site-specific art

   

About Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm

Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøn is an artist and composer from Copenhagen. Christian has presented his works at galleries, museums, festivals, and concert spaces throughout the world, including Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Mois Multi in Quebec Canada, A plus A Gallery in Venice, Műcsarnok Kunsthalle Budapest, Sound Reasons in New Delhi, Skan II / Skanu Mežs in Riga, Üle Heli in Tallinn, Ostrava Days in Czech Republic, Ultima in Oslo, Overgaden - Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and Museum of Contemporary Art Denmark.

Christian’s work has been awarded by Prix Ars Electronica, Japan Media Arts Festival, Edigma Semibreve and Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s Foundation, and he holds a Master's degree from the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark.

Links from the podcast

• Learn more about The Receiver
• Visit Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøn’s website
• Learn more about Struer Tracks – Biennial for Sound and Listening

 

Edited transcript of this interview with Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm

How do artists transform abandoned buildings into sound installations?

Robin: We're focusing in on a piece today called The Receiver. What's it like for a viewer to experience The Receiver?

Christian: I guess if we take the piece from the outside, it's this huge silo, 50 metres in height, so it's quite large. And on the outside you can only see this object on the top. That's a radio telescope which is receiving electromagnetic radiation from the sun. So basically, it's this decommissioned silo with a strange object on the top of it. And then as you approach the building, you will immediately notice this kind of quite immense rumble.

That's due to quite a large subwoofer, also in the infrasonic range, placed inside of the silo. And basically what happens is that this radiation from the sun is being received by the radio telescope and then this energy is put inside of the silo in the form of sound and split into different ranges from the low frequency spectrum in the bottom and then highs in the top. So basically it's from infrasound to ultrasound. So it's the complete human possibility of hearing.

Robin: It's all layered up physically in the building. I didn't pick up from the documentation that you could actually hear it from outside the silo as well.

Christian: Yeah, it's quite physical because it's a really large-scale work all in all. So I also chose to work on a large scale in terms of sound.

Robin: Yeah, actually the scale thing is really interesting because this is part of a continuation of your exploration of something that's actually even bigger than human scale—quite often cosmic natural experiences that we can't feel and sense—things like the radioactive waves from the sun. I'm sort of interested in whether or not the space for this came first, or did you have that sort of sense of, this is the particular thing I wanted to sense? And did you then go looking for the space, or how did that sort of work in this particular piece?

What is The Receiver by Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm and how does it work?

Christian: Yeah, it was Struer Tracks – Biennial for Sound and Listening in a small city called Struer in Denmark. And I was invited to create a piece. So I was on a field trip and the first thing I noticed when I reached the city from the train station was this silo. And somehow during—I think it was a two-day research trip—during the entire trip, the silo was always looking at me, almost, because it's so massive. You can see it from all over the city. So it became this kind of mark to aim after, and it was not possible to access it officially, but we kind of found a way, so to speak, to access it.

It had been decommissioned at that point for, I can't recall exactly, 20-plus years, as I remember. However, it was inhabited by pigeons and a lot of their remains. So basically it was this quite scary place because, as the silo was decommissioned, much of the material inside—some of the machinery—was pulled out, but some was still left. So it was quite a big mess all in all.

Robin: Okay, so it was almost that moment where, as you were invited to be part of the event, you were given the chance to look at different spaces around the town, and you decided to do something in the biggest space you could almost find.

Christian: Yeah, somehow. It's a really sculptural building in many ways and had this really interesting plateau on the top that just felt like—it almost felt like a pedestal to place something on top of it. However, it was not possible to use it. And maybe that's actually one of the largest challenges in this project was actually to get access officially and to clear out the building and get the permits to actually use it.

Robin: I was thinking through that—that all of a sudden you fell for and reacted to the space that wasn't available, that had all of these logistics problems and safety problems around it. Because people did walk through the silo to experience each level, didn't they?

Christian: Yes, exactly. So the audience could walk freely in the building. And of course, we made a lot of safety measures so there wouldn't be any accidents, because there were potentially lethal drops. So that was also a lot of work to make it safe.

How can solar radiation be turned into sound for an installation?

Robin: So you reacted to the space and said, actually that would be a fantastic space to do something in, because it's such a dominant piece of the town. How about levelling up of the frequencies and levelling down of the frequencies and the placement of the frequencies in the actual silo? How did that sort of come about?

Christian: I can't recall exactly. I think it's important to say that this project was created also in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, a Danish audio company. They have their innovation department in that city. We had some meetings and we found out that actually it could be beneficial to make this collaboration. So they were helping me out with some of the technical aspects, and I guess using me as some kind of outsider to be placed inside their innovation department to shake things up a bit.

So I had a lot of meetings with them, and my idea was to kind of go beyond the spectrum of our hearing. And basically what was accessible was these kind of—I think it was ten stories in the building—so that was divided from 22,000 down and then loudspeakers were developed to fit that frequency spectrum.

Robin: Okay. So they had a chance to sit there and play with some different types of problems and technologies and ways of thinking than what they used to.

Christian: Yeah, exactly. And it was quite interesting with the acoustician engineer, Jacob, who was assisting me, because first when I talked about the loudspeaker in the basement, that was—I think it was 37 downwards—he said, Christian, that's impossible. That's going to be like several metres, like, in diameter and so on, requires so much space and energy. And then when he got these kind of Christmas lights in his eyes, when he realised, wow, okay. It's actually possible because we have a huge building. Usually in his line of work, it's like smaller and smaller and more efficient and so on. And here it was kind of different rules, so he could really use the ideal, how can you say, like, theory and methods and so on, and not compromise. So that was quite interesting.