Landscape machines
Erich Berger (2022)
Plonk collected extended field recordings and created a multichannel generative soundscape for the installation Landscape Machines by Erich Berger.
Photo by Erich Berger.
From the website of projekt atol (accessed 2024-03-28):
With Landscape Machines, Erich Berger continues to investigate the topics of radioactivity and the landscape. Deep time, spectral phenomena, innate and anthropogenic landscapes are still at the center of his attention, only this time explored in the local context of Slovenia – the Žirovski vrh uranium mine and the human and non-human processes that shape its past and futures.
The installation consists of an artist text, a graphic representation and visual overview of the landfills Boršt and Jazbec, seismic and gamma radiation observatory, sonic and electromagnetic environment, and a proxy Landscape Machine Boršt in a cloudchamber.
The installation is the result of more than a year of research and fieldwork and is a kind of observatory for sensing the planetary machine. The installation itself is an apparatus that we can enter in order to observe the processes at work in the spatial and temporal dimensions below and beyond the threshold of our perception.
Plonk realised a 3-channel generative soundscape for the installation.
It integrates live readings of a scintillator with soundscapes collected on site using a custom installation setup on a Linux machine running SuperCollider and Reaper.
For the soundscape of the installation, field recordings collected on site was prepared in Reaper and dynamically played back through SuperCollider to create the generative soundscape for the installation.
Experimental field recordings made with Struktophon and custom coil pickups were part of the generative soundscape.
The sound of a Geiger counter measuring radioactivity on a rock sample on display within the installation was part of the generative soundscape.