AUDIO-VISUAL INSTALLATION
4-channel video, 20-channel surround sound.
How do humans come to terms with environmental change? Video and sound recordings made at a depth of 30 metres in the receding Morteratsch Glacier create an immersive space that invites us to attune to the textures of this remote water world.
3D Visualization
Uncannily evocative of microscopic biological matter, the work brings into focus our emotional responses to the lives of landscape forms at the microscopic scale. Documenting the rapidly vanishing and rarely accessible ice draws attention to the melting process as much as it formulates a way of perceiving the environment not as a passive envelope for human action, but an evolving more-than-human co-creation.
We can come here to dwell and reflect as we, as a species, rapidly and irreversibly change our environment. What is the role of nostalgia in a time of environmental turmoil? What are the ethical consequences of looking for beauty in the environmental changes we are driving? What does a multi-scalar formulation of the sublime reveal about the environmental-emotional worlds of contemporary ecologies?
Short Video Cut
Spatial Audio Residency
During a 12-month residency with Amoenus, I developed a 20-channel spatial audio rendition of the installation. The soundscape forms a spacious tapestry of interconnections centred around the body of the listener. It employs reverb responses recorded in glacier caves on Svalbard by a team led by Professor Pawel Malecki (Department of Mechanics and Vibroacoustics AGH, Kraków University of Science and Technology). For more information about the reverb recordings, please click here.
Awards
- MUSE Digital Art Award – Finalist
- “The Energy for Tomorrow” group show at Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, Italy (11/2023)
- LOM Audio LOM+you programme.
Past Shows:
Fragile Ecologies, London (UK) (LSE Law / TBA21 Academy )
Film screening and discussion organised by Marie Petersmann (LSE Law School) and Maria Christina Achilleoude (LSE LLM student), in the presence of curator María Montero Sierra (Head of Program at TBA21–Academy) and artist Leonard Maassen.
Works shown:
– Susan Schuppli, ‘Cold Rights’ (2022)
– Leonard Maassen, ‘Heart of Glacier’ (2023)
– pantea, ‘⚪’ (2022)
– Inhabitants (Mariana Silva & Pedro Neves Marques), ‘What Is Deep Sea Mining? (2018-22)
Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan (IT). November 2023.
Finalist group show of the MUSE Digital Art Award, entitled “The Energy for Tomorrow”.
The Crypt Gallery, London. May 2023.
A/V installation loop, running time 8’49
Polyphonic group show at The Crypt Gallery, London, curated by Lilyan Cheng (CRiSAP) and Juice Shuting (LCC). Featuring a small number of A/V works by different artists, the exhibition turned the gallery space into an area of overlapping resonating bodies that viewers could walk around.
Short video, running time 01:38
Venue:
Collaborators:
Project Duration:
Ongoing
Start Date:
January 2023
leonard maassen 