Shots by Steve Roden of his installation at the Happy New Ears festival, recently held in Kortrik, Belgium. It is titled “When Books Are Like Butterflies,” and the festival ran from September 13 through today, September 28:
it was loosely inspired by georges rodenbach‘s book bruges-la-morte, not so much the story, as the atmosphere of the text. i began by notating every sound in the book as well as every color in sequence, and then used the lists to generate a sound work, a text work, and a set of images. the text and images appear in the form of dust jackets, which frame the speakers playing a 13 minute audio piece through 15 speakers (and the images are mostly from the backgrounds of some of the old music photos i typically run on airforms). rather than create an illustration of the text or a work that conceptually fits cleanly into a single resolve related to the text, the piece presents numerous paths through the same information, allowing the sounds in the book to manifest themselves in different forms (i.e. as sound, text, and image). my main interest is in creating a space of intimate wandering, where one has to get close to the books not only to read and see, but to begin to approach the activity of listening with the same intimate response to reading and looking at small things. even though they are birthed from the same source, the text sound and images do not inform each other as much as they offer different paths of experience.More on the festival at happynewears.be. Other installations were by Aifoon, Sofia Bustorff, Clea Coudsi & Eric Herbin, Ludo Engels, eRikm, freq_out 7, Michael Graeve, Hans Peter Kuhn, Jacob Kirkegaard, Mieke Lambrigts, Stefaan Quix, and Minoru Sato.