Signe Lidén
(1981, Norwegian artist based in Bergen) makes sound installations and improvised performances that deals with resonance of places and objects. Her installations are often sonic and spatial examinations of social and cultural phenomena through an experiential form of research. Signe Lidén has a MA in Fine Art from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and the Nordic Sound Art joint master’s programme. She has been displaying work at home and abroad in recent years, including Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium. At present, she is working as a research assistant for Re:place at Bergen Academy, and in 2013, she is one of the artists in the residency programme Resonance — European Sound Art Network.

writings I
writings is a work made for the Flanders Festival Kortrijk spring 2013 and will later be shown in Maastricht and Krakow as a part of the Resonance residency program. The realisation of the work was made in collaboration with Roar Sletteland.

The installation (text by Barok):
Made of metal, wood and sand as its core materials, with motor as its kinetic conductor, it is an apparatus for listening to earth in motion. Mechanical steadiness of the motor echoes the industrial age when perception of passing time was subsumed to the logic of mechanical clock, relentlessly steady succession of ticks which requires one to either tune in to or put in still completely, since it never slows down or speeds up. Alike in Writings, time passes in spins of rods attached to gears firmy chained together, subjecting them to the ordering rhythm of pulls of the motor. This driving force of order is however disrupted by chaotic movement of suspended rods. Hung on the strings on one end, scratching the sand and stone terrain on the other, and themselves composed of multiple parts,they are given wide enough operating field to develop their own agency. Perpetual interaction of these forces leaves its trace on the ground with sand as its canvas. Sand piles borrow themselves as a site of record, an archival medium of the activity of the apparatus with rods as its grand styluses, writing itself down, as if it would be its main reason forexistence. Operation of the machine produces the sound landscape of metal and wood scratching sand and stone and chains meeting the gears. Visitor is also invited to tune in to another sound layer, that of the inside of the machine. The speakers placed in pairs inside the listening constructions amplify the inner activity of the spinning rods. By placing ears inside of these hearing holes a visitor is taken to sense vibrations and resonance of the rods mediated by the contact microphones attached to them. While one listening station faces a brick wall of the building, another gives listener a sight of a abstract drawing.