Every Vibration, Every Sound, Hangs in the Air:
The Sound and Video Works of Dodda Maggý
Tina Rigby Hanssen, PhD in Art History and Media Theory
June 2017

ARoS FOCUS // NEW NORDIC: The Sound and Video Works of Dodda Maggý
Interview with Dodda Maggý
Lise Pennington, Chief Curator at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum
June 2017

LP Where do you find inspiration for your works?

DM I think that I find my inspiration in film and music. And literature, actually. Music is sort of my background. I first studied music and then when I started working with visual arts, I sort of found ways to create my own language using a musical sensibility combined with films. Some of it comes from my interest in phenomenology, especially from reading Gaston Bachelard and Jean-Paul Sartre. But also lyrical filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Sergei Parajanov. Even though I studied art and, of course, look at art and follow what’s happening in the art world, I’m more inspired by cinema and music. When it comes to what I read and research, it’s mostly connected to cinema or film theory and music or sound design rather than visual arts.

LP The animations you compose, do they create a base for the music to grow or is it the other way around?

DM Well, it’s a bit funny because it’s both ways at this point. I find it hard to say whether it’s more the music or more the visual arts. For example, first I studied music and then I started working in visual arts and, in particular, video. There’s a connection between video and music, as they’re both time-based, so you’re constructing something on a timeline and, to put it very simply, it deals with build-up and tension.

When I started working with the visual arts, it was sort of the combination between film and music and how the two mediums combined created a new space, somehow. When I was in art school studying visual arts, I was working with both music and video and then, after my master’s degree, I went back to study- ing musical composition. After returning to the musical department, I felt my musical language had been ruined, somehow. I could feel that my brain had changed after studying visual arts. When I talked to my fellow classmates, I realised that I saw mu- sic from another perspective. I’ve been wondering if I’m more of a visual artist than a composer. Sometimes I feel that I don’t belong to either. I feel I’m really somewhere in between in my creative thinking and how I process ideas.

LP So your work isn’t a visualisation of music? It’s much tighter than that?

DM Yes, it really is. In my recent works, I’m working much more formally with these animations and, in a way, I’m exploring compo- sition and music visually. But I’m still composing when I create images; they’re made with a musical sensibility. And, actually, in some of my older works, I was using music as a narrative tool to drive the underlying ‘story’ of the piece, as the music was paired with video. I’m composing a visual language of music appealing to all senses, somehow.

LP So when you say that you’re also very inspired by films, how does that relationship work, then? Is it from well known classical films or is it more from film theory that you get your inspiration?

DM I use a lot of technical elements from film theory in the way I work with video. There are some technical devices in the cinema that are quite underestimated. Like the power of audio. We sort of forget about it, we forget about the sound design, and we forget about the music; we take it for granted that the sound is just a natural component of the image when, in fact, it’s constructed and added after filming. If you remove the music and sound de- sign, the film would collapse.

As a viewer, you become familiar with the language of moving images through popular media. For example, it wasn’t until I was in art school that I really started to study video art and, even at that time, in the early days of YouTube, you could only see video art in museums and galleries. I could only read descriptions and see stills of a lot of the pieces that I was learning about. Today, you can find almost anything online. So I use these structural devices that viewers understand to create my work, but I don’t necessarily use them conventionally. I’m not a tradition- al filmmaker. I play with the devices, sometimes skewing and twisting them.

LP So, it’s more on a technical level than on a story line level?

DM Well, I think it’s both. I think that a significant part of the story is portrayed through sound. It’s just not always obvious to the viewer. Through sound, the viewer experiences another level of the narrative, and the sound contributes a lot when creating the energy of a film. I’d say that we, as viewers, underestimate the power of sound design. My earliest influence was David Lynch and particularly the old Twin Peaks series. I’d go so far as to say that a lot of his work really is the sound design, the way he uses music. The sound is really what creates the energy in his visuals. For example, he sometimes uses a very low bass, almost so low that you cannot hear it, but it moves the air, it sort of creates another dimension of something you can’t see, which, I think, is a theme he often works with.

LP I recently heard a documentary about how David Lynch collaborated with the composer on creating the theme tune for Twin Peaks. How they did it as a mix of everyday recognisable sounds, which fill our daily lives without us noticing it, but still carry a huge part of the meaning.

DM Yeah, totally. Even in the new series, I really do think that David Lynch is very much working like a sound artist. David Lynch and Angelo Badalenti used the music technique called leitmotif, which comes from opera (Wagner) and denotes a short, musical phrase associated with a particular person, place, or idea. Now it’s standard use in the cinema. But in the old Twin Peaks, Lynch gave each individual main character their own theme song and he then wove these themes, these leitmotifs, together with the overall music. He used leitmotifs to indicate something that’s happening ‘below the surface’. For example, when we hear a theme of a character not appearing on the screen, the viewer can’t see him, but his presence is looming.

LP Let’s move on to your kaleidoscopic works. In some of your works, the symmetrical visual patterns are constantly transforming into ‘kaleidoscopic’ compositions. What do you intend to show your audience by using this approach?

DM Well, I’d like to start with the first one I did entitled DeCore (aurae). That piece represents a new way of working. I was really interested in sound art – I feel that I’m always working with music even if it’s in videos. It started with me filming plants and then I began manipulating and sampling the images into new organic shapes and putting these back together in a new structure. It took me four years to work out this piece, since it was so tricky to turn it into something interesting. There’s a fine line when working with something that you want the eye to engage with, something that could be viewed as merely decorative. It’s really tricky because it’s so easy to label it decorative and thus redundant. I’m playing with this line and poking fun at it, hence the title DeCore, a play of words for something that’s perhaps decorative and something that’s hard core. I’m pushing this idea of constant rapid movement; the eye is almost always unable to catch the image as it is forever changing.

What I found was that proportions are the key. They are the key elements in our experience of something as being visually pleasing or displeasing. With DeCore (aurae), I’m transferring the way I work with sound art and field recordings into visuals. I’m recording images and sampling/manipulating/changing the recordings and layering them whilst creating new structures. When I did this piece, I was thinking of music. I really approached it as if I were making a sound piece – even if it was silent. I was working with the proportions of the shapes in the image, structuring them proportionally as you do when composing notes; creating intervals which are basically just notes structured in certain proportions. I’m making harmonies, structuring the rhythm of the movement and creating colour combinations. But there’s another level, too; usually when I am working, there’s a personal approach and a formal approach. So you can often enter my work from different perspectives. In this instance, the personal connection to the visuals that I started creating really resembles an experience of migraine where I lose my sight. I gradually go completely blind and, as I lose my normal sight, I start to see these colourful organic shapes. A lot of people experience this and it’s called an aura. Each individual experiences it differently but, in my case, it’s like these flashes of lights and colours and shapes that sort of take over my field of vision.

LP Like looking through a prism?


DM Yeah. Exactly. But it’s never the same shape; the shape of the image or the hallucination changes each time.

LP Could you please try and explain to me how, technically, you compose the visuals?

DM Like with DeCore (aurae), it starts with recordings of plants and flowers. Then I take this material and I manipulate the images with filters and effects to create new organic shapes. And then I do it again, and again, and again. This is often how I work. It goes through many different stages of change until I achieve the final shapes. I actually created, like, two hundred new visual flowers that I then used as a base to create new shapes by layering them into new combinations. In DeCore (aurae), you can see the visual flowers as both really big and really small. I manipulated the video so many times, layering it, that I was able create the final structure from a sort of patchwork of video fragments.

LP So you create this composition as you would a piece of music and then there’s a personal level that refers to a health condition that you have: the migraines. The formal element that you mentioned is the rules or the rhythm that you’re incorporating into the repetitions, so to speak?

DM So there’s a structure of forms and colours, of movement and rhythm. There are different things and ideas behind it. One is that I formalise the structure of the visuals in the way I would compose sound on a timeline. For example, the structure of elements moving in a repetitive motion is the same that I might use when constructing a sequence of musical themes or melodies in a musical composition. Another is that, with the continual rapid movement, my idea was to represent the idea of ‘energy’, something that’s never still, constantly moving and changing. Also, the movement is reminiscent of the way I experience the visuals in the migraine hallucinations, the shapes flashing and moving.

LP Yes, but the rhythm is also in the repetition of the gesture that you copy over and over again?

DM Totally. And that’s actually sort of a recurring theme for me, this repetition of patterns.

LP So when you’re fascinated by something that looks like a kaleidoscope, does that refer to your migraines or does that fascination stem from somewhere else?

DM DeCore (aurae) comes from these kinds of hallucinations or what you’d call it. That sort of led me on to exploring geometry and sacred geometry that goes even further, to these alchemist graphs where you have forms or shapes which, when puzzled together, all fit into different combinations. Sacred geometry led me to explore alchemist graphs, which go into a sort of mystical space. The graphs are used as symbols for hidden knowledge in the occult or mystical groups and my fascination with hallucinations comes from the shapes I see, these fractured shapes which are somehow everywhere in nature. This fascination led me on to exploring fractals and from there on to geometry.

In DeCore (rosen), which is the silver piece, I’m really exploring sacred geometry and the main visual motif is actually created from an alchemist graph. This is the first piece that I created from something else that is not conceived within my own self, but from an image that I found. I’ve actually been collecting images of alchemist graphs for a long time. I didn’t really want to, you know, understand them or try to find a meaning in them, but I still wanted to access them and make them my own. I wanted to absorb the images and then create my own output from those images – and in that way try to understand them. Not by reading exactly what it was supposed to mean, but by assimilating it into my own work. My own process of working with this material.

LP And in what way does Curlicue (spectra) relate to DeCore (aurae) and DeCore (rosen)?

DM They all connect. They all sort of paddle along some road that I’m exploring. In DeCore (aurae), I’m working with these images of plants which exist in the real world. In both DeCore (rosen) and in the Curlicue (spectra), I’m working with an idea of artificial material, material that doesn’t exist in the real world. While in DeCore (aurae), the base material is images of plants, the base material in DeCore (venus) are pearls. In DeCore (rosen) and Curlicue (spectra), the base material is created in a 3D software where I created 3D circular shapes that I used as the material for new constructed shapes used in a more traditional animation technique developed by myself. So the source material is computer-generated, one might call it a non-existing material, but the way I work with it is by using an animation technique. As in the other works, the images and shapes are created through multiple processes.

Curlicue (spectra) is a reference to the migraine hallucinations. This is, so far, my closest attempt at portraying these hallucinations. They are so colourful, almost like bright neon lights. Like if you compare it to the resolution in a video, it’s like 1000K. The resolution is so fine that it’s utterly impossible to portray. Last time I had one I was thinking, “Okay, I’m going to grab a pen and paper and I’m going to draw it.” But when I was actually about to do it, I looked at my pencil and it was like I was drawing with a crayon compared to what I was seeing. It was just impossible to try to capture the colours and the speed of it – as it moves very quickly – it’s almost neurological. It’s very colourful, the whole colour spectrum. There’s also a meditative element to Curlicue (spectra), both in the image and visually. The spiral grows continuously but still contains its shape. There’s movement but still nothing changes. It’s slightly similar to Minerva in terms of dealing with ideas of time and space.

I think we all have an internal visual world that it would be fascinating to shape out in materials, so that we could see each other’s inner visions, which is what I’m really fascinated with. I actually very rarely talk about these hallucinations, because it’s so personal and somehow it’s easier to talk about the formal aspect.

LP I would like to ask you about the women in your films. They look like archetypes in Hollywood productions and you’ve chosen to work with a certain kind of female figure in your films. Could you tell me more about the kind of woman or kind of female figure that appears in your films? For instance, what fascinates you with the crying woman in Madeleine?

DM That’s a very direct Hollywood reference. In Madeleine, I was re- ally, as a performer, taking on the role of the actress. The idea comes from a split desire within myself – as with everybody – to be desired. Women have been portrayed in certain ways in the media and we have an idea of what it is to be desirable. And this stereotype of the desirable woman is something I both want to embody, but it’s also a stereotype that I despise and want to reject. And I despise this desire in myself. As a performer, I’m confronted with this issue and I’m often dealing with my own desire of wanting to be presented in a certain way.

So, in Madeleine the character is quite ironic, I think. She is glitzed up with the lights, this Hollywood lighting, and make-up, and this pink glittering dress, and then she’s crying. It’s almost like a fetishist kind of crying. It’s almost like she’s enjoying it.

LP Fetishist crying, you call it?

DM Yeah, you know. It’s so over-sentimental that, to me, it’s totally ironic. It’s a character that we know, especially in old Hollywood films – the helpless woman that needs to be rescued.

For example, in the film Notorious by Hitchcock, Ingrid Berg- man starts out as this strong rebellious female character hunted by the secret service, and then at the end of the movie, she’s giving away all her power and needs to be saved by the male hero. This is the scene where she’s the most beautiful and one experiences the ending as romantic, it’s like the perfect movie ending. It’s quite disturbing to me that we’re so used to these female characters.

LP Does that relate to the female person in Lucy, too?

DM Lucy is a bit different, actually. But they’re still connected, because in there I’m portraying an opera singer. In Madeleine, I’m taking on the role as an actress and, in Lucy, I’m taking on the role as opera singer. In both, there’s this very embarrassing desire that I want to be the actress, and that I want to be the opera singer. It’s really role-play, and it almost goes back to this sort of playing, you know, when you were a kid taking on all these roles. Well, I was just sort of role-playing in my studio, and I just thought, “Okay, I’m not an opera singer. But I want to be an opera singer, so I’m going to make it happen. I’m going to create the space for myself. I’m going to create this world. Nobody else is going to hire me as an opera singer.”

LP But what’s this fascination with opera singers about?

DM I’m really fascinated with tragic heroines and Maria Callas, especially. She’s such an extremely tragic figure. I’m fascinated with these really strong females, like Maria Callas and Jacqueline du Pré, the cellist. I can’t really say why, but I’m just sort of fascinated. Actually, I love Maria Callas so there’s a basic desire in me; I want to put myself in the shoes of Maria Callas and, at the same time as I did that piece, I was really exploring the voice as a phenomenon.

And now it goes into film theory; in the cinema, the voice is often used as a character. Especially when it’s a voice that doesn’t have a body, like a narrator, or you hear a voice, but you never see the person. This sort of voice almost becomes supernatural. It has the same qualities as a being that is otherworldly, because it doesn’t have a body. It comes from a writer called Michel Chion. He’s one of my favourite writers. He has a name for this bodyless voice. He calls it the acousmêtre. It’s French and doesn’t translate.

LP What does it mean?

DM The word comes from acousmatic and it actually goes way back to Pythagoras, who used to teach his pupils behind a curtain. So his pupils weren’t allowed to speak, and he used to stand behind the curtain and teach, so that they wouldn’t see him. They could only hear his voice. So it refers to this ancient way of teaching. The followers of Pythagoras were called acousmatics and this bodyless voice is called the acousmêtre. I was really exploring the voice and, at the same time, I created a musical composition. I was working with the voice as a material and as this ‘semi’ being’. When I was developing the piece, I really had to find this voice. The way I’m singing in Lucy is not my usual voice. It was, like, a voice that I had to find or create within myself. I had to look for it and I found this voice within my body, an entity that wasn’t really mine. I’m focusing on the voice as a material; so when I recorded the voice, I did it in close to try and find the grain – the physicality. The physicality is sort of the structure. And then the way that I composed the piece in terms of chords, the way I layered the voices together, I was really trying to create a feeling of light. I don’t know if it makes sense? When I was composing it, the chords and the sonic affect, that I was trying to portray, was light. It’s mastered in surround sound. It’s the experience of a voice floating in space. It’s the voice, it’s like this bodyless entity that moves around the speakers and, as a viewer in space, you’ll feel the voice flying around you.

The story of the opera is really about this character that has a voice, a voice that seems to be always escaping from the character – or possibly embodying the character. And we can only see the character when the voice, the sound source, is actually coming from the image. It can feel as if you can only see the character when the voice is where the body is, and then it escapes. It’s the drama about this character trying to embody and hold on to this voice. But it’s all disappearing in darkness somehow.

LP Now we’ve been talking a lot about sound and the underestimation of sound in visuals, but you have a film in the exhibition that is soundless, Minerva. Could you please tell me a bit about it and why it’s without sound?

DM I think that silence is as important as sound. I also use silence as a device. I never put sound to an image ‘just because’. Or an image to sound ‘just because’. There always has to be a reason. So if there wasn’t like a purpose for it, then I would rather have it silent – or the other way around.

LP So why is it silent with the owl in Minerva?

DM First of all, I don’t think that sound adds anything to it. But the thing about Minerva is that there’s this owl that’s sort of continually flying, but it’s not going anywhere. It’s in this sort of dark space. Or not even space. It’s out of time and out of space. There’s no sound. It’s this other dimension which is outside of out of time and out of space. Minerva is really about time and space. Or the absence of time and space. The way I approached Minerva, actually, is how I would approach drawing.

LP How is that?

DM Often when you draw, it comes straight as an idea and you draw it down. The drawing is a bit more spontaneous. I think it took me 2-3 months to create Minerva, working day and night, which is like the fastest piece I’ve ever done. Timewise, if you compare, like, a drawing with a painting, to me, Minerva is like a drawing, even though it took, like, 2-3 months. Like a quick sketch.

Variations at BERG Contemporary
Dr. Valentino Catricalà
August 2017

From painting to moving image, from sound to painting, from cinema to sound, and from past to present—these are the traditions on which Stephen Herbert’s definition of “time- based visual media” is based. We find these transitions in precinematic media such as the phenakistoscope or the zoetrope: early examples of animated images, often mixed with sound, creating a loop and formal structure. This time-based visual media also belongs to the tradition of avant-garde artists such as Walter Ruttmann or Hans Richter, exemplified in their sound moving paintings that form a loop and an ongoing formal arrangement. The avant-garde tradition then continues with the emergence of structural filmmakers such as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and Tony Conrad, who utilize a fixed camera and the aforementioned repeated loop structure. Dodda Maggý re-exemplifies this tradition, using it as a key for understanding the role of image and sound in today’s contemporary art.

Dodda Maggý is an Icelandic artist and composer who employs the methodologies of musical composition and filmmaking within her unique work that is strongly influenced by a cross-disciplinary approach. It is difficult to affix her work within one field or artistic genre. It can best be described as lingering on the verge of cinema, sound art, video art, and music composition, belonging in between them all.

In addition to her visual arts background, she has studied music and cinema. She carries a strong passion for narrative cinema and experimental documentary filmmaking into her artworks that bear strong references to both disciplines. Dodda Maggý’s work emerges from the observation of the relationship between an internal and an external image. The artist analyzes the development of internal images that are born from personal dreams and imagination, putting those experiences forth as the fundamental basis of the work. Dreams, fantasies, and memories become the core subject matter of an audiovisual composition that gives the audience the possibility of becoming part of new perceptual experiences.

Exploiting the potential of digital technology, Dodda Maggý divides the image into different elements, each encompassing a specific structure. As within a soundscape, the motion of each element creates a self-organized organism. This is a structure we would find in a cultural context, such as music, as well as in nature, such as the growth of a human being’s mental images or the developmental processes of plants. It is therefore safe to state that the connection between cultural and natural processes is important in Dodda Maggý’s work. The artist’s work develops a new way of understanding mental and physical evolutionary phenomena through a visual music narration.

The notion of narrative is important for understanding Dodda Maggý’s work. If we look at the videos in this exhibition we don’t see a conventional cinema-like example of narration or a linear story, but an unorthodox unveiling of an evolving process, a playful constellation of creative elements. The formalistic narrative work that bears striking methodological evidence of musical and cinematic influences is evident in Étude Op. 88, No. 1, one of the three main pieces in the exhibition. The work is composed of 88 opal stones, each stone representing a note of a piano, creating a direct correlation between the image and the sound of the stones. The work encompasses seven prints materializing possible harmonic combinations. The structure of Étude is based on a concept of “visual music” that harks back to the 1910s and ‘20s, inspired by the John Whitney method of composing, creating musical compositions with visual imagery.

Dodda Maggý’s formalistic approach to image and sound is evident in her work entitled C Series, this time using video as a tool to compose music. The series relates to Étude in that it examines a single instrument, in this instance the flute, choosing fifteen notes from the instruments range that correspond to fifteen circular images that are animated into fifteen video loops, where each form represents a note and the forms create a complex visual layout. The sound is made to stand independently, with the video removed. This is the foundation for further musical composition within the piece, starting through the process of structured visuals, sourced from the carefully chosen initial fifteen notes. When the musical composition was complete she created a new video animation, titled Coil (C series). It is made from the same source material as the 15 animated forms, but presented in a new structure that is intended as a visual focus point accompanying the sound. It was later also detached from the audio as the working process progressed. The videos are therefore evidence of an artistic process—not a direct visualization of the sound heard in real time, but simply a material suggestion of what sounds might look like. Each note is presented in a wide range of tuning, interacting with one another in endless ways, each revealing the many temporal layers of the artwork’s creation. Dodda Maggý focuses on the relationship between mental and actual phenomena. Transforming mental images into audiovisual ones, the work of the artist produces the perceptual experience of the audience. In that way, the exhibition space becomes an organism in which the audience faces new cognitive realities.

Such is the case in DeCore, a series started in 2008 that reflects on mental phenomena such as hallucination and synaesthesia, as well as concrete objects. The artist creates new organic forms by recording flowering plants, applying recording and the methods of sound design to video. The flowers are detached from the background and resampled. The concrete objects in this case are the flowering plants: phenomena in motion. The work is an ongoing organism composed of many different little elements (or frames). Every single frame is in constant motion creating a fractal structure.

The exhibition is therefore composed of three main pieces, not conceived separately and, just as in Dodda Maggý’s artworks, the exhibition combines different self-contained elements. All together these elements create a complex organism that can be perceived from different points of view. The three pieces are designed to allow the audience to move freely in the exhibition space, to navigate within a myriad of cognitive possibilities, without any obligation to follow a fixed trajectory.

Variations by Dodda Maggý at BERG Contemporary
art*zine
Erin Honecutt
August 2017

Dodda Maggý’s exhibition Variations is on view at BERG Contemporary from August 18th to October 21st. The artist was recently awarded the ARoS – Aarhus Art Museum’s Young Talent Award. Using sound and music as departure points, the artist further compounds their intertwining by using rhythm and narrative to engage the senses. Her animated symmetrical compositions explore the experimental possibilities of translating sound into visual form with a technical mastery of the formalities of harmonics and how these form the basic formations of the universe. With a dynamic interplay between the parts and the whole in the image, the patterns appear as though in perpetual evolution, like a kaleidoscope. In an in-depth interview, the artist explains her complex working methods as we walked amongst her work.

Erin: Can you tell me about this piece (DeCore (etude))?

Dodda: So this is an ongoing series called DeCore that started in 2008. When it started as a video I was working with methods of applying field recordings and sounds to video. I basically went around with my video camera and filmed flowering plants and trees and then started to manipulate that material to create new organic forms. The first version, which was called DeCore (aurae), took me three years to figure out the right form. I was thinking a lot about visual music as well as synesthesia, the state of having your senses crossed that causes people to see music or experience forms as colors. I was applying these methods and sounds to video and also thinking about how to represent music. DeCore was then installed as a large silent installation, followed by another version, and now I’m showing two of the newest versions here, DeCore (etude), and DeCore (loom). It’s the same source material of trees and flowering plants, actually.

I’m continuing to resample in this exhibition. However, I’m not re-sampling the works themselves but going back into the source material and making new manipulations- almost a remix of the original recordings. With this piece, I actually wanted to take the source material and create print stills. It’s another thing to really create the image rather than take a still, so I created the video in order to take the still image.
There is a lot of crossing of mediums in the show. I wanted to create a technique in order to create prints as this is my first show exhibiting prints. Usually, I’m only working with video, music, and sounds so I had to create a technique that I could relate to in order to create still images. When you’re used to working with time-based art, which is always moving, you have to recalibrate how to translate this movement into a still image.

Erin: It’s going from 3D to 2D, so of course, it’s a huge recalibration.

Dodda: You have to think about it differently. So this is like the DeCore series but evolved. I’m still thinking about music here and I think music is still the understory of everything I do. I start with music before visual arts.

Erin: You studied both right visual art and composition, right?

Dodda: I studied both. Before I went to university I felt like I had to make a decision between going further into music or visual art and I chose visual art because I felt there was space for both. Later, I finished studies in composition as well. I think as a visual artist, I really connected with video and this time-based medium because I understand it as it relates to music.

Erin: It’s as though your process of making videos is an image of harmonics itself, so your work is both in the medium and the resulting image.

Dodda: That’s my aim, but we can debate whether it comes forth. In this piece with these small sorts of flowers, each flower is made out of many recordings of flowers, so there are many details combined. In just one little flower there are multiple processes happening at once. I like the size of it because you can see the details.

Erin: You’re making your own language, it seems, by working with each note in itself and making them work together to become its own vocabulary. What programs are you using?

Dodda: I use a lot of programs of all kinds and am mixing all of them. It’s my own method of layering that I developed with many variations.

Erin: The last exhibition here at BERG was of Steina and Woody Vasulka, the video art pioneers. They were some of the first to make tools that would manipulate audio into visual and vice versa.

Dodda: There is definitely this link. Steina actually was also trained as a violinist first. Having a background in music seems to be the case with a lot of video artists, especially in Iceland.

Erin: Narrative and rhythm seem to be two intertwining themes in the exhibition, each carrying the other forward.

Dodda: That is definitely the case with the videos, especially this one that I’m making to create prints from. I’m making the videos with this musical application and thinking about proportions. Just like with different chord combinations and sounds that make major and minor chords, we also have these proportions visually which create tension or harmony in the image so there is also geometry involved. I’m applying a set of movements to this, as well as colors obviously. This is much more monotone, I would say, but maybe baroque monotone. The first DeCore had each frame changing and was more chaotic but this is more still. It holds the shape but it still changes in color. This looks a lot like rhythms, almost like beats.

Erin: I was reading another an early article about your work about how your work engages the viewer visually but the rhythm engages your body, so it somehow traps you between these two states of being when you’re watching it. Perhaps this was more the DeCore installation when the viewer could be part of the projection and be very physical, but I think it still has a very mesmerizing effect on both body and mind.

Dodda: I’m very interested in these sensorial effects. My earlier work was more portraying these different states while now I’m more interested in creating this effect for the viewer. I know I can never estimate how the effect will be on the viewer, but I can stimulate some senses, definitely.

Erin: Where does the name DeCore come from?

Dodda: DeCore comes from something on the verge of being decorative, which is a total taboo. When I starting working on DeCore in 2008, to do something decorative or visually appealing was almost like porn. So I’m playing with crossing that line and questioning if it being visually appealing makes it less interesting. I’m playing with these aesthetics about how the proportions and harmonies bring affects. It’s also on a fine line to do something flowery so there is also a play on that. There is so much information in each frame, really, so I’m just pumping information out.

Erin: Isn’t it like that with music? Why is music allowed to be harmonious but not visual art?

Dodda: It goes in circles. After the Second World War, Romantic music was just not allowed. So, really serious, atonal music came into fashion because this Romantic music was connected to nationalism and it was totally out. It really just goes in circles depending on what is accepted at the time, beautiful music or atonal music. I think there’s been a shift in the last ten years, although it’s almost hard to say this out loud. I feel a shift from a focus on very theoretical to a slightly more Romantic, or more spiritual aesthetic. I think the themes I have been flirting with are actually being more accepted whereas before they were a little bit ‘outsider’.

Erin: I think it is definitely a noticeable shift.

Dodda: I don’t know if it is a trend, but it is definitely more accepted. Even before, to talk about energy, was a bit out there. It wasn’t really what my teachers were going for when I was in school, either. I can’t generalize it but I can definitely feel a shift in the atmosphere of what is going on and what is accepted.

Erin: The new age needs a new age, it seems. Is all of the work in the exhibition a variation of DeCore?

Dodda: No, there are three variations. We have three main pieces: DeCore, C Series, and Étude. Moving from DeCore to C Series, I am really continuing to investigate this relationship between the visual and the aural. I was interested in making a technique of composing using video and music but here I am much more in composition mode. I’m studying the flute as an instrument. I picked fifteen notes to work with and composed them in this one composition that is part of the exhibition, a nearly 18-minute long piece.

I made these video forms, a circular form with different proportions, for each of the 15 musical notes. Then, I connected each note to this form and I created a video animation with the music corresponding to what is happening in the video. With each composition, I pair a note to a form, which creates the musical composition. Later, I decided to remove the video and compose on the base of sound. I have one video from this process, but I’m only going to show the notes. When I was making the composition, I made another video from the same source material which became Coil, a part of C Series.

C Series is the focal point for the composition and so the accompaniment for the music, but then in the working process, I realized I didn’t need it. I’m just showing the music, like a work in progress, that shows how I composed this piece. If we go into the purely musical side of it, it appears as though I’m working in music. However, I’m not that interested in just composing. I’m interested in detuning.

We have this modern way of tuning instruments at 440 hertz. All instruments are tuned after that, but there is an older tuning at 432 hertz. When we tune after that the harmonics are a little more balanced. There are a lot of different theories about why we changed it, mostly conspiracy theories, but no one is really sure. So the tuning today is a little bit harder. You can see in visuals of chords how the frequencies make different forms.

I was thinking about how interesting this conflict is and wanted to start to detune my notes. I’m working from the range of 440 down to 432 up to 448 hertz so my instrument is mistuned. What happens when you have these fine misattunements is you get these frequencies that meet and give off all these vibrations, overtones, and new frequencies that erupt. Even if it is fifty notes, and three octaves, they are all in a different tuning and when they meet they create this friction. I also took the notes I created and manipulated into each of these movable forms. I changed the speed of the vibration, so it was shaped by how quickly the note reverberated.

As you can see, I’m really going into the material and treating musical notes as material. Each note is carefully created and then manipulated. Afterwards, I layer them and compose them together. You can hear this piece on the record and you can also see these two projections in these two projections on the wall. They are still part of the piece and part of them will be in the daylight, so they kind of disappear into the light in a mystical way.

Erin: Can you explain this visual (the animated projection in C Series) a bit and how it correlates to your vertical investigations?

Dodda: So the music is a vertical investigation and that’s the translation from lyrical film where I’ve been working in video with this vertical investigation with video that I’ve been applying to music as well. This piece is the one I made after the composition was finished and is actually a result from starting DeCore and investigating proportions, going into geometry, and alchemist’s graphs. This is actually created from an alchemist’s graph and shows an Egyptian energy key. I don’t make my work after other images, though, I have three works where I’m working with alchemists’ graphs. Usually, I never use outside material but I was just interested in these geometric images that have this visual energy to them. There is some message being told and I’m not exactly interested in finding out what it is supposed to tell me but I’m interested in the energy of them. That is why I wanted to assimilate it into my own process.

Erin: The name of it even, ‘alchemist’s graph’, sounds like a parallel investigation to the work you’re doing. What an alchemist does is tries to transmute gold out of these chemical elements.

Dodda: But it’s all symbolic in the end. When they’re talking about gold they’re actually trying to find spiritual gold. It’s spiritual, not material. Alchemist’s search for gold was sacred knowledge.

Erin: Even that transition between material and spiritual knowledge and matter is like a parallel investigation to what you’re doing.

Dodda: Especially in this one because I’m working with the base material in C Series which is actually these 3D computer generated spheres. I basically took snapshots of 3d images and took them through a very 2d way of working, almost to this old school level of animation. So I’m working with this artificial form to create this alchemist’s key. To me, it feels like energy plugged into this loop. It also reminds me of the music symbol where you have an F key or G key and you ascribe a key to your composition.

I’m also breaking a lot of musicology rules here by playing with terminology and using it inaccurately on purpose. The tradition is such a long one and can be quite fixed, so it is perhaps good to playfully skew it a little. I also did this with Études by really playing with the terminology. We’ll be releasing a record on the opening, a limited edition vinyl of 30 editions that will also be on Spotify. I’ve been working with music for such a long time and it has been such a nice experience, materializing these prints, so releasing the prints and materials and music as materials is quite exciting.

Erin: You’re working in such an immaterial realm, so I can imagine it is exciting to have such a material outcome in an exhibition.

Dodda: It’s a new development in my work for sure. Here are the different forms of the notes for C Series, screened as just a small projection in the exhibition. I find the musical compositions much more interesting than the visuals actually. The original animation I made doesn’t add anything to the composition so when I’m working with video and music together there always has to be a purpose. If there is no reason I usually take it out as I would rather have silent videos or stand alone sound pieces. You can see this is just how a material note might materialize. I’m just opening up ideas of what music might be. This almost could be presented as a sound piece as I’m working with sound ideas even though it is silent.

Erin: This is a similar shape to the Mandelbrot set, a fractal named after the mathematician. Anytime you zoom in or out into one specific part you come out eventually into the same shape for infinity.

Dodda: You can find it in nature and in the cosmos. The environment is just the basic building block of everything around this fractal relationship. Even in these snapshots of planets of stars, it’s always fractals. Even the path Venus moves around the sun is a fractal. It makes one wonder how everything is connected to these forms.

Erin: You can look at your work very formally. You don’t have to go there, but it’s laid out for you if you want to, however you can also just recognize the mathematical and musical harmony in the formalities.

Dodda: If people are interested in certain subject matters they pick it up or they don’t. There are different perspectives of looking at my work- very formal, very sensorial, and sometimes working with more mystical ideas. I’m always questioning and never offering answers.

Erin: You’re still very technical in your mystical notions, which is a beautiful combination.

Dodda: The last part of the exhibition is called Étude for which the basic building blocks are these Opal forms. There are different investigations into visual music which started in the 1910s and 20s by visual artists trying to find ways of composing music visually. It’s hard to define as a genre because it crosses all these styles between animation and structural film, but the umbrella term is ‘visual music’ which began in Europe and was developed later in California. One experimental filmmaker, in particular, was intriguing for me, John Whitney. He regarded himself as a composer but his instrument was the camera. He spent his career trying to develop ways of translating visuals into music. So I was quite inspired by his technique and wanted to experiment with his technique to apply it to my own experimentation. So I’m not duplicating but I am interested in how he structures entities together in a visual. I think there is definitely a visual reference to his work in Étude. Étude pays a little bit of an homage to him in the name Étude, which is usually a musical composition that a skilled composer creates for his student to practice. I’m using it as an exercise for practicing visual music.

I want to make a visual music piece in this tradition and so I regard this as my practice piece in visual music with a certain methodology. I’m also making a wordplay between the use of “Opus” in music which stands for the “work number” and is written as Op. In Étude, Op. stands for the number of opal stones, so the first piece is actually 88 Op. I’m also examining the piano in particular by working with 88 stones which represent the 88 notes of the piano.

In the Étude series of prints, you can see the full 88 notes, as well as compositions with 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, and 77. So I’m making up these rules, imagining how to materialize chords into a visual. I created these seven structures that are in the composition and I these as my elements in the installation. So this is a very formal piece but the idea actually came from a dream. In the dream, somebody took me up to the cosmos into black space and showed me opals growing in the darkness. I was being told that they have energy and frequency. So I was quite intrigued by these stones mined from the earth that have a measurable frequency. So even if it was a dream, it is still quite formal, personal, yet very formal. I was also interested in working with the relationship between the visual and the sonic/aural/musical in this piece and exploring perceptual experiences involved in translating internal experiences into the external to represent different states of consciousness.

Erin: This cultural critic named Gene Youngblood wrote a book in the 70’s called Expanded Cinema about how all of these expansive techniques in film have been parallel with the expansion of consciousness.

Dodda: Compared to where video was in 2000, you had to have a video camera and know how to use it, but today it’s totally part of our daily life. It’s so interesting how video is the same material as our memory, like our current state of consciousness.

SOUND AND VISION - DON’T YOU WONDER SOMETIMES?
Magasinet Kunst
Anette Lindbøg Karlsen
Oktober 2017

Som det sidste led i udstillingsrækken ARoS FOCUS // NEW NORDIC slog ARoS i september dørene op for en udstilling med den islandske kunstner Dodda Maggý. Magasinet Kunst har talt med hende om drømmeuniverser,  bevægelsesidéer og om følelsen af, at der bag overfladen gemmer sig andet og mere end dét, som øjet umiddelbart kan se, og øret kan høre.

”Skal vi tage interviewet på dansk eller engelsk”? er mit første spørgsmål til Dodda Maggý. Jeg ved ikke meget om hende, udover at hun er født og opvokset i Island og er uddannet fra Kunstakademiet i København. ”Lad os tage det på engelsk”, svarer hun og tilføjer, at hun på dansk er bedre til det skrevne ord end det talte.

Det er da heller ikke talte eller skrevne ord, der præger Maggýs kunstneriske arbejde. Hun beskæftiger sig nemlig med audiovisuelle værker og installationer i et felt mellem kunst og musik. Stillestående såvel som bevægelige billeder med og uden lyd, drømmende og sanselige billedsprog, visuelle virkemidler og kompositoriske processer er centrale omdrejningspunkter i Maggýs værker, hvilke bl.a. kan ses på hendes hjemmeside og videotjenesten Vimeo – og i øjeblikket i ARoS’ mørke udstillingsrum.

Når billede og lyd smelter sammen
Tilbage i 2016 blev Maggý inviteret til at deltage i ARoS FOCUS // NEW NORDIC sammen med otte andre yngre kunstnere fra norden. Maggý var med det samme begejstret for udstillingskonceptet og den danske interesse.

”Udgangspunktet for udstillingen har været at præsentere de mange facetter i mit arbejde. Derfor afspejler de udstillede værker på forskellig vis min praksis, der beror på at undersøge det sprog, der knytter sig til billeder og musik,” fortæller Maggý og uddyber: ”Mine performative værker belyser ofte forskellige mentale og psykologiske tilstande eller erfaringer, der f.eks. knytter sig til minder og drømme. Dem forsøger jeg at give en form, således de kan blive oplevet som levende billeder. I det formelle arbejde interesserer jeg mig for at skabe sansemæssige oplevelser, bl.a. ved at udforske de strukturer og fortællende kvaliteter, der knytter sig til video og lyd – ofte i en kombination eller sammenstilling.”

Beskueren for øje
I værket ”There, there” ses et udsnit af et landskab, der fastholdes som et statisk billede. Nøgne træer med spinkle grene indrammer et bagvedliggende bjerg, der sløres af en røg, der over de 4:30 min., som videoen varer, skiftevis tiltager og aftager i styrke. Ligeledes gør lyset i billedet – snart er det stærkt, dramatisk og farvestrålende, snart svagt og dystert. Billedet ledsages af lyde, der som fare- eller advarselssignaler skaber en fornemmelse af, at der foregår noget under overfladen. Hvad holdes skjult? Forløsningen udebliver og som i mange andre værker af Maggý står man tilbage med en følelse af, at det handler om andet og mere end dét, vi umiddelbart kan se eller høre. Derfor bliver man nødt til at sætte sig selv i spil.

”Jeg stiller spørgsmål uden at have svar. Derfor er beskueren vigtig for mig. Man kan sige, at mine værker afhænger af ham; hvad han føler og relaterer til, og hvordan han ønsker at ’være i’ værket,” siger Maggý og påpeger, at hendes mål med sin kunst er skabe en oplevelse.

Beriget af oplevelser bliver man da også i mødet med Maggýs værker, der ikke kun beror på mystificering eller suspense, men som også påkalder sig beskuerens ubetingede opmærksomhed og tilstedeværelse i særegene universer, som man ikke kan undgå at blive fanget ind i – fysisk såvel som psykisk.

Et indre liv i mange farver
Et af udstillingens iøjnefaldende værker er installationen ”DeCore (aurae)”, som består af en projicering af funklende psykedeliske farver, der spredes som kalejdoskopiske formationer i et mørkt rum, hvor beskueren enten kan stå stille eller bevæge sig frit rundt.

”Værket handler om mine egne oplevelser af migræneanfald, hvor jeg går rundt i blinde. Her oplever jeg neurologiske forstyrrelser, og jeg ser kun blinkende farver og former,” forklarer Maggý. ”Værket er således et eksempel på, hvordan jeg søger at materialisere indre, immaterielle oplevelser i mit arbejde.”

Om værkets tilblivelse fortæller Maggý, at hun har filmet blomstrende planter og samplet billederne. Derefter har hun fjernet blomsterne fra baggrunden, reorganiseret dem og skabt nye organiske former ved brug af spejleffekter. Denne omdannelse er blevet gentaget igen og igen og på den måde tager de levende ”blomsterbilleder” nu form som en art hallucinationer.

”Værket er en struktureret form for visuel sammensætning, der er redigeret på samme måde, som var det en sang, hvor man tager hensyn til timing og flow,” siger Maggý og uddyber: ”Med værket ønskede jeg at skabe en energi, hvor hver ramme var i konstant bevægelse – hvor billeder skifter hvert sekund. Selvom der ingen lyd er, er den ikke på ingen måde fraværende, idet den tager musikalsk form af farve, bevægelse og rytme. På den måde kan man sige, at værket handler om at gøre lyd visuel og at få en synæstesi mellem lys, farver og lyd til at opstå.”

Når lyd bliver visuel
Lignende tanker kommer også til udtryk i værket ”Lucy”, hvor en ung kvinde står i et mørkt rum iført en kort pailletkjole. Vi ser hende kun glimtvis, men hendes stemme er konstant i en ren og klar toneklang. Efter ca. halvandet minut støder flere stemmer til, høje som dybe. Men stemmernes ejermænd er fraværende – den unge kvinde er helt alene. Gradvis akkumulerer stemmerne, og efter fire minutter slutter de i en samlet røst.

Hvad man som beskuer måske ikke lægger mærke til ved første øjekast er, at lydens styrke og intensitet er bestemmende for, hvordan billedet lyser op og toner ud i det mørklagte udstillingsrum.

Maggý fortæller, at med ”Lucy” har hun arbejdet med tanken om, at stemmen er egenrådig og bruger blot kroppen som et instrument.

Kendetegnende for ”Lucy” såvel udstillingens andre værker er, at de beror på en gennemarbejdet billed- og lydside, et filmisk eller teatralsk formsprog samt at de indgyder umiddelbare sanseligt øjeblikke, hvormed Maggý understreger, at hendes arbejde beror på en fænomenologisk tilgang til sin omverden – altså til en tanke om, at vores oplevelse i kraft af sansemæssige erfaringer.

Kunsten at udvide ørerne og øjnene
Maggýs værker er tidsbaserede og bygger altid på idéer om bevægelse. Og så har de en stærk reference til musik, der på mange måder er det centrale virkemiddel i hendes praksis.

”Fordi jeg er en kunstner, som har en musikalsk baggrund, er det naturligt for mig at bruge musikken til at få mine idéer til at komme til udtryk. På den måde har jeg skabt mit eget kunstneriske sprog” siger Maggý og fortsætter: ”Nogle ville måske kalde det, jeg laver for musik eller lydkunst. Nogle gange synes jeg selv, at det klart defineret, andre gange falder det imellem begreber.”

Det er tydeligt, at det for Maggý ikke handler om faste begreber eller principper. Det handler mere om at kredse om, at betone lydens strukturelle lag og lade dens former og potentialer som materiale og betydningsskaber komme til udtryk.

”Som komponist har jeg altid været fascineret af at udforske lyde og åbne op for idéer om, hvad musik kan være, hvorfor den kan få os til at blive følelsesmæssigt overvældet og give os fornemmelser af at være i en anden tid eller på et andet sted end vi faktisk er,” siger Maggý og forklarer, at hun er interesseret i at materialisere lyd ved at udforske, hvordan den bliver til og kan fremtræde foruden udforske, hvordan musik kan blive oversat til samme visuelle kvaliteter, som bevægelige billeder har.

”Man kan sige, at jeg gerne vil udvide ørerne og øjnene lidt” siger hun og smiler.

Processuelle rejser
I sit arbejde bruger Maggý forskellige metoder og teknikker. Processerne er vigtige, fordi det er hér, at lyde eller billeder arrangeres, transformeres og manipuleres inden et værk kan nå sin endelige form.

”Det hele starter med en idé eller følelse, som kan være visuel eller auditiv. Den forsøger jeg så at materialisere ved at gøre den til en struktur eller form, der opstår eller udvikler sig i selve processen. På den måde kan jeg nogle gange føle mig som en videnskabsmand eller en opfinder i laboratoriet,” siger Maggý og forklarer, at hun hele tiden udvider sine arbejdsmetoder for bedre at kunne skabe, hvad hun kalder for sine ”lyriske universer”, som er meget personlige. Blandt andet arbejder hun med en animationsteknik, som hun selv har udviklet, og som kun hun kan bruge.

”Mine videoer er ret ’håndlavede’, selvom jeg arbejder ved en computer. Mange tror fejlagtigt, at videoerne er computergenererede. Det er faktisk animationer, der tager måneder at lave.”

Det er også en af grundene til, at Maggý foretrækker at arbejde i sit studie. Hendes arbejdsprocesser strækker sig over lang tid, og det er ikke usædvanligt, at nogle værker tager op til et år at lave – måske endda længere. Derfor arbejder hun også med flere værker på samme tid. Det giver en god variation, samtidig med, at det også kan berige processerne. Det er et langsommeligt arbejde, men altid spændende, da det også bringer overraskelser: ”Når man arbejder længe med et værk, hvor man er fokuseret på de mindste detaljer, fjerner man ofte fokus fra helheden. Derfor kan man også pludselig opleve eller se en effekt i sit arbejde, som man ikke havde forudset. På den måde er det en rejse – fra idé til det endelige værk.”

Teknologiens indflydelse
Til mit spørgsmål om, hvordan det er at arbejde med digitale eller elektroniske medier som grundlag for sin praksis, svarer Maggý: ”Vi lever i en verden, hvor medier spiller en stor rolle i vores daglige liv. Vi overbelastes med billeder og lyde, og vi kan alle skabe videoer og musik, f.eks. via apps i telefoner og computere. Men for mig handler det om, hvad man ønsker at sige med disse medier, og hvordan man som kunstner skaber noget meningsfuldt og engagerende.”

”For mig handler om at være nytænkende og om at tænke over, hvordan man præsenterer noget visuelt for beskueren, som er andet og mere end blot mere information. Dét, jeg gerne vil er at skabe et rum – en pause fra omverdenen – hvor vi kan opleve og reflektere på egen hånd.”

Dodda Maggý er født i 1981. Hun har uddannet sig inden for musik og kunst og har studeret på The Iceland Academy of the Arts og Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi. Siden midten af 00’erne har Maggý været aktiv på den internationale lyd- og kunstscene og har med sine værker bidraget til udstillinger, events, messer og festivaller. I dag bor og arbejder hun i Reykjavik.

I marts 2015 slog ARoS dørene op for en ny udstillingsrække ved navn ARoS FOCUS//NEW NORDIC. Fokus blev rettet mod den nordiske samtidskunst og havde som udgangspunkt at vise en række yngre nordiske kunstnere med meget forskelligartede produktioner. Dodda Maggý er den niende og sidste kunstner i udstillingsrækken. Hun modtager i den forbindelse legatet Young Talent, som gives med støtte fra Det Obelske Familiefond.

What do you know about Nordic art? If your knowledge begins and ends with Bjork we suggest checking out "Nordic Outbreak," an exhibition illuminating the Northern region's influences and aesthetics. The Streaming Museum exhibition features over 30 moving image works from Nordic artists that will be projected on screens in public spaces throughout New York City - including a "Midnight Moment" with Bjork in Times Square. Many of the works on display that were selected by co-curators Nina Colosi and Tanya Toft respond to the clashing identities in our new digital age. We reached out to Toft to learn more.

HP: The press release for the show mentions the stereotypical Nordic aesthetic as "minimal, melancholic and naturalist"... something this exhibition aims to change. Which artists were influential in casting Nordic art this way?

TT: An artist like Olafur Eliasson is a contemporary Nordic artist whose work with light, space, fog and sensitive play with colors of nature’s elements, reveal an aura of something Nordic. It conveys certain aesthetic ideas that reveal symptoms of romanticism and a seeking after the sublime rather than the beautiful. There is a melancholic feel to that meeting between man and nature, which we also find in the works of Jesper Just for example, who is in the Nordic Outbreak program with his work “Llano” (2012). In selecting the works for Nordic Outbreak, we were also interested in renegotiations of nature and landscape, which artists like Dodda Maggy, QNQ/AUJIK, Jette Ellgaard and Magnus Sigurdarson enact.

HP: Do you think there is a more accurate driving aesthetic of Nordic culture today? If so, what is it?

TT: I don’t think there is one driving aesthetic, but the artworks in Nordic Oubreak show symptoms of improvisation and play, which is somewhat “new” in a Nordic art context that might have been characterized more by control and high quality. Some of the artworks express aesthetic cultures that were not “born” out of a Nordic context. There is a struggle between introspection and extroversion – following a right wing and nationalist political period in some of Nordic countries up through the 2000s, financial crisis, and in response to the digital age. There seems to be a clash between looking in and looking out, guarding and departing. In quite a few of these works, existential questions are brought beyond the invidividual and psyche – which has been a tendency, perhaps – and pointed toward one’s role in a greater context. It is also characteristic that these artists express and awareness of the medium they are working with, and in many of the works the audience is addressed as individual viewers whose optics are shaped in a contemporary world. That we find in the works by for example Marit Følstad, Mogens Jacobsen, and Iselin Linstad Hauge.

HP: What was one of the greatest challenges of putting the exhibition together?

TT: Asking questions like: What does it mean to take ‘the digital’ as a curatorial premise - and wrapping your head and decisions around that. I don’t think there is one model. We wanted to instigate logic to the exhibition that would open up for questions concerning materiality, originality, network, and questions relating to the role of moving image in an urban context. Also, working around the partnerships we established along the way has been an interesting challenge - conceptually and practically. We lost some venues in New York that were ruined by Hurricane Sandy, which was challenging but which eventually let to exciting partnerships that we had not anticipated, for example with Dumbo Improvement District and the Manhattan Bridge Archway.

HP: What is the age range of the 30 artists represented?
Were you specifically looking for a selection of younger artists?

TT: Age was not a parameter. In fact, quite a few of the artists are quite well established. We were looking for artists that experiment with moving image, as a medium and thematic frame of expression. This is why the collection includes very ambitious animation works as well as classic, documentary-style video works. The show is not just about “new” aesthetics - it is very much about the issues put forward as societal critiques, as voices of “the happiest people” that are rarely expressed in an international context.

HP: For those of us who are huge Bjork fans, which artist do you think is following in her footsteps?

TT: I think there is a tendency of artists to become accepted for their multimedia talents, of which Bjork is a pioneering example. We selected her for the Midnight Moment in Times Square because she is a performance and visual artist who completely brakes with the barriers of art, technology, music and digital structure, which she demonstrated with her Biophilia album. There is no “next Bjork”. But there is a generation of young artists who cross over music and media art (e.g. Oh Land and Lucy Love, to name a few from the Danish music scene), not just by hiring good stage designers but by expressing their music visually as well. That is really interesting - a new kid in the school of fine art, I am sure.

Video/Music
Vane
2 March – 1 April 2006
Paul Usherwood

Dodda Maggý creates a series of female characters based on personal experiences, which are then enacted in front of a video camera, accompanied by piano music composed and played by herself, sometimes re-worked using a simple recording technique, building layers as if sculpting. She creates audiovisual narratives that objectify the female body without degrading it to the status of a mere object. Digitally manipulated in post-production the characters are eerily illuminated and set within a void space, adding to the theatrical nature of the work. She edits the video in the same manner as one composes music; with highs and lows and a certain rhythm designed to create tension and heightened emotions. This method allows the work to communicate self and body as experienced in a context where existence is challenged or threatened.
 
Both video and music have the ability to construct narrative. Maggý uses both to attract her audience’s attention and then hold it until the end of the piece. She deliberately stretches the limit of how far she can take a certain emotion, sometimes to the point of being over-dramatic, leaving the viewer unclear as to her exact intentions – is she being serious or joking? This ambiguity gives the audience space to draw their own conclusions as to what the work is about.
 
‘Video/Music’ brings together two video works by the artist. Stella (2004) consists of two projections, back to back. In the first projection, a female character is shown walking, aware of being watched. Initially, she appears to enjoy the attention and flirts with the viewer. However, she gradually becomes uncomfortable with the gaze and frantically tries to escape it. In the second projection, two girls hop up and down in slow motion. As they take their bunny hoods off it transpires they are identical. They continue to jump euphorically and end up on the ground, touching and flirting with each other.

In Margret (2005), a small monitor shows a girl dancing in circles against a black background. She is reminiscent of a figurine in a music box, a ballerina on stage, or a woman dancing in a peepshow. In between advancing and retreating, she falls down repeatedly. Close-ups are evocative of melodramatic scenes from the black and white silent days of early cinema. The process is both enchanting and slightly disturbing to watch. One might think of it as a metaphor for the process of experimental creation: you begin somewhere, fall and stand up again, fall, stand up and so on.

The dramas and dilemmas of the desiring gaze emerge as a main theme of Dodda Maggy’s two video installations in this exhibition.

Stella (2004) comes in two parts. Part one begins with two girls bouncing up and down against a black background on what is probably a trampoline. Slow motion and a Debussy-ish piano score of tumbling scales and arpeggios (specially composed and performed by the artist) combine to suggest the intoxicating fun they are having. However, we soon discover this is not just the Billy Elliot-ish fun of bouncing up and down; it’s also the joy of simply being together. They clearly find each other irresistible. And this is confirmed by the closing scene where the two of them are shown sitting on the ground, gazing into each other’s eyes.

So what is their relationship? Are they lovers? Are they identical sisters? Is one of them the doppelgänger of the other – the kind of perfect imaginary friend that some children like to invent? Certainly, although they wear different coloured T-shirts and leggings, in many ways they seem uncannily alike. Before we can get any answers, however, the second part of the piece on the wall opposite starts up.

The lack of a sound track in part two seems to confirm that the young woman whose face we watch has a very different mood. Like the ‘girls’ in part one this character is also played by the artist. However, this is not immediately apparent. On the contrary, initially she seems happy enough to be the object of another’s (the viewer’s) gaze as she walks along. Her jewellery, hair and make-up suggest she is at an event of some kind, a film premiere perhaps, and she’s confident she’s looking good. Gradually though we realize she finds the viewer’s attentions intrusive, even threatening and the second part of the work ends with her in obvious distress walking faster and faster, and finally breaking into a run,
in a desperate attempt to escape.

It might seem therefore from this description that Stella is a pretty straightforward exercise in fetishistic scopophilia, albeit the narrative in each part remains unresolved. Indeed, the moment when terrified and tearful the young woman tries to hide from view might be seen as distinctly Hitchcockian in character. However, it does not come across like that. This is mostly because of the way the two parts are projected: not in a conventional manner but one after another, on opposite walls of the gallery. For what this does is ensure that at a certain moment we are obliged to turn and face in a new direction: a simple device but one that means that we feel estranged from the narrative; we have to engage with it in a way which is active rather than passive.

A similar Brechtian device occurs in the other work in the exhibition, Margret (2005). Here what prevents us from becoming immersed in the narrative is the fact that we have to listen to the accompanying soundtrack through headphones and have to view the image on a monitor that is just a few centimeters across. Because it’s so tiny all we are able to make out is a tiny white speck in the dark. However, when, rather clumsily, the camera moves in closer it becomes clear what this is. It is a young woman in slightly childish clothes (the infantilized woman again) spinning round and round, playing that game beloved of small children where you spin round until you make yourself dizzy and cannot stand up anymore.

I say ‘game’ because initially, as we watch her spin round, fall to the ground, get up, and start spinning again that is how it seems. Indeed, for a while it is possible to imagine a smile playing on her lips. However, as the sequence repeats itself not just once, but two, three times, this hardly seems appropriate. It is evident she has lost control and is continuing more or less against her will.

But why? What drives her on? At one level it could be the music we hear on the headphones for the impression is that this is being played by some invisible piano-playing authority figure. It is melodious but the way it is repeated over and over has a relentless, domineering quality. However, perhaps it is not so much this as we ourselves who are responsible for her ordeal. How come? Well, there is something about the business of viewing her ‘game’ on a tiny screen that makes one feel like a scientist in charge of an animal experiment or a pleasure-seeker operating an end-of-the-pier peepshow or one of those pirouetting ballerinas in a wind-up music box that you play with as a child.

Is Margret therefore in some way a feminist reflection on the role cinema plays in the construction of the image of woman? Interestingly, the fact that the woman wears starkly black and white clothes coupled with the slightly hammy, theatrical way she throws up her hands every time she falls to the ground and the clumsy camera movement gives the piece a decidedly archaic, early-cinema feel. It does seem therefore as if we are being asked to consider the way in which during its history cinema as an apparatus has served to manage pleasure for its viewers in accordance with the psychic formations of masculine sexuality positioning woman as image and man as the bearer of the look, as Laura Mulvey’s famous essay puts it. Indeed, in common with Stella, Margret might be read as an illustration of Mulvey’s thesis that in patriarchal culture the image of woman is “bound by the symbolic in which man can live out his fantasies and obsession through linguistic command imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer and not maker of meanings”.