Sonic Spectral

The viewer enters a low-lit space, inside it a constructed object bathed in light and an all-encompassing sound. We are being introduced to a transformation, to experience a whole that is in constant motion but stable and consistent. The piece activates and interacts with the space, creating a perceptual whole which evokes an awareness of the viewers’ physicality. By walking around the space and finding new viewpoints, we not only create moments but a passing that gives rise to speculations on time and rhythm. This ambiguous object before us is both accessible and deceiving, obvious and hidden. The principles of light, materiality and perception are unveiled, and at the same time they disappear into an experience of surface and image.

The relationship between our perception, the surface of things and their mass and their reality, is constantly being questioned and tested, not only as a philosophical subject but as the object of experience and knowledge in our daily experience. Questions about what is visible, or perceptible, are a part of how we participate in the world, how we react to our environment and how we give value to different parts of the image we have of the world. In many of his works, Sigurður Guðjónsson has created situations where the viewer is given an opportunity to approach these questions in a new way, to question the way in which reality appears to us and even the reality of what we perceive. Hitherto hidden worlds are made visible and the principles behind the manifestation of things are questioned, or presented in a new manner, requiring a new interpretation. Sonic Spectral raises questions about surface and image, about object, material, movement and perception, by inviting the viewer into an aesthetic experience that activates different senses and viewpoints.

The image consists only of light until it falls on the surface, only then does it become perceptible as an image, and the surface is only visible when light falls on it. In Sonic Spectral, the surface enters the image and vice versa. This is not a simple illusion, but the merging of image and surface, thus drawing attention to our fragile interpretation of reality. We are reminded of how delicate and fleeting our access to the world is, but also of the complex and multilayered relationship between us and the world.

I.

What is it that we perceive, is it the object itself or is our perception only an image assembled by our mind (thus open to distortion) and if so, how is this image connected to the world as it is? This is a simplified version of one of the basic questions of philosophy. Although the idea of the world as it is has mostly disappeared from philosophical discourse, the question remains important. How come we almost never err in our estimation of distance and size of items that appear within our perceptual field, apparently without any thought? We trust our senses to give us information about the world, and we place so much trust in them that when they fail or lead us astray, we are shocked and instinctively correct the image. Our relationship with the things around us is so important to us that we have to be able to trust it, almost unconditionally. Therefore, it doesn’t come as a surprise that this relationship has often been described as a sort of automatic process, or a process governed by the law of causation. The camera and photograph are commonly used as metaphors. Our senses are said to simply register what is in front of them – whatever our senses perceive creates our perception of our environment. The mind then processes this information and we create experience accordingly. Although this adequately describes our experience of how our senses work, the metaphor is easily disrupted; a straw appears to break on the surface of the water.

One way of reacting to this sort of problem is by explaining the relationship between an object and its perception in a different way than through cause and effect or mechanical processes. When George Berkeley put forward his ideas about perception as a language or even language of God, it was the relationship between the world and its perception he wanted to show in a new light, moving it out of the mechanical world view of modernity. Berkeley’s idea was that it was better to describe this relationship in similar terms as the relationship between a word and the thing it refers to. We learn to see (or perceive) by learning the language of vision. The symbols we have for each object in the world are contingent, or at least not causally related to the objects, but they are, just like the words and concepts of language, made stable and dependable through our use and knowledge of the language and of the rules that define the behaviour of words within it. Nature, our environment, speaks the language of perception that we learn by using our senses, but the relationship between perception and the perceived item is best likened to the semantic relationship between a word and object. [1] Thus, everything in our perception has meaning, but also becomes meaningless as soon as it is stripped of the context of the language/perception to which it belongs.

In Sigurður Guðjónsson’s work, metaphysical subjects like these are pulled to the surface and instead of being the subjects of conceptual thinking, they become the objects of physical perception. We are given a chance to see the metaphysics of perception. The image falls on the surface and the surface of the object merges with the image in a vibrant moment. We don’t experience the work solely as a surface, but also as a fluid relationship of sound, surface and image. The ever-changing surface of water, always the same but never the same comes to mind.

What is it, that is made visible here? Is an obvious question when dealing with the content of an image. By asking in this way, we assume the image is stable, that it is an item that retains its properties through time and different context. Sonic Spectral demands other kinds of questions. By dissolving the boundaries between image and material, image and sound, the work gives an insight into a different world, where the ever-changing surface is stable, and the object only exists through the sound that surrounds it.

Perception as a language, as a process only made meaningful through our knowledge and experience, is also an obvious metaphor. Language (apart from referencing and explaining our reality) has form and time and is captured in certain patterns and moods. The image in the work is not constant, it is a temporal process with repetitions and construction, just like a language. Thus, the image’s aesthetics lies in its construction and time, but also in its relationship with the object, with the surface, and so creating an opportunity for experience which is simultaneously of what we know and a chance to question it, to feel the shortcomings of our knowledge, like when we hear an unusual word, maybe even from an unknown language. This is both extremely mundane and exotic. Here, it becomes tempting to seek out a viewpoint which can be explained in light of previous experiences. An aerial view of a moving world could, for example, cover a part of the experience which the work brings to light. The metal plate in the image is a plate with punched holes, used to convert notes into material, and this long silenced medium here serves both as a sort of flashback with a new meaning, and as a new subject, a new way of experiencing an everyday item.

We have become accustomed to (and even take for granted) that language, as well as image, can be reduced to a digital binary system. The binary system is not a natural language, and as we know from the banal mistakes of AI when the subtleties of images or language escape it, both language and image is always partly tied to the viewer’s experience. The language Berkeley referred to in his metaphor, was a natural language that has been polished and become clearer by our constant use of it in the world, and has also adopted a certain vagueness, suitable to our experiences.

Our perception of the world is one of the things we rely on to understand and define what it is that truly belongs to it, and the image is one of the methods we use to visualise it. With the arrival of tools such as the microscope and binoculars, and the discovery of X-rays and other invisible forces that cut through our reality, one of the main dilemmas has been, not only within the field of science but also in art, to redefine what it is that we mean when we refer to things as perceptible, and what methods we can use to present the perceptibility of the world. In 1913, Kandinsky describes how the confirmation of physics’ new world view, where all material is void and atoms, equals the world losing its shape; “everything became uncertain, precarious and insubstantial. I would not have been surprised if a stone had dissolved into thin air before my eyes and become invisible.”[2] Our senses can no longer bring us first hand the truth about that which indisputably lies before them. Like Sven Lutticken has discussed in his articles “Shattered Matter, Transformed Forms: Notes on Nuclear Aesthetics” (I and II), material and its visibility has been a political and scientific subject of the modern age. The perceptible world has proven to be unstable, if we look at it long enough, it dissolves into imperceptible forces and principles. The effect of one kind of particle upon another, and the forces that keep the atom together, can only be made visible through presentation, as an image, not of the objects as they are but as they are the most intelligible to us. This crossover between knowledge and interpretation on one hand, and a model on the other, is of course not new in art. In the context of the 20^th century it has increased importance, like Kandinsky clearly indicates in his musings/questions about how the visible is related to the worlds that appear to us through the constantly new viewpoints of technology. And maybe it becomes even more urgent to ask ourselves how this mode of presentation suits this new world, which is always the relationship between the visible and the hidden.

In many of his works, Sigurður Guðjónsson has led the viewer into worlds that are invisible except from a certain technological viewpoint. For example, in works like Perpetual Motion (2022) where the viewer travels through the world of metal particles, magnet and light, accessible through the zoom lens of the camera. This also applies to works like Fluorescent (2021) where chemical reactions or the actions within fluorescent tube are the subject, but the work is simultaneously a contemplation on light and object, material and surface. These parallel worlds (or underworlds) gain meaning and content through our experience of the works, and at the same time they raise questions about the nature of perception, the nature of viewing. We are reminded of the limitations of our perception, evoking thoughts of the imperfection of our knowledge (we do not identify what is in front of us, or wrongly identify it) or the limitations of possible presentations.

Sonic Spectral is a new world of this kind. The image’s light and sound join with the material of the tangible world, and the work’s materiality is both real and based on presentation, or even illusion. Sound is here both a thing that can move in time, unchanged, and a one-off event, a unique fraction in time that can happen only once and is tied to material qualities and the auditory canals of each individual. An event that can happen repeatedly, constantly in new context. The object before us comes to life in the same ambiguous space of perception and thought. Rhythm or pulse leads us on in a joint perception of vision and hearing.

Jóhannes Dagsson

(Translation: Ingunn Snædal)

Sources:

Berkeley, George. Works on Vision. The library of Liberal Arts. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Indianapolis. 1963.

Lutticken, Sven. “Shattered Matter, Transformed Forms: Notes on Nuclear Aesthetics part 1”. e-flux journal, 94, 2018, p. 1-11.

Lutticken, Sven. “Shattered Matter, Transformed Forms: Notes on Nuclear Aesthetics part 2”. e-flux journal, 96, 2018, p. 1-14.

[1] See, for example, Berkeley (1963).

[2] Kandinsky (1913), here from Lutticken (2019).

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Sigurður Guðjónsson is best known for his time-based media works where image, sound and space form an un- broken whole. He focuses particularly on the function of a variety of technical equipment, where the viewer is lured into a world of soothing repetition, rhythm and order, and the boundaries of the human and the mechanical become blurred. Sigurður Guðjónsson represented Iceland at 59th International Venice Biennale 2022 with his installation Perpetual motion, curated by Mónica Bello. Guðjónsson was awarded the Icelandic Art Prize for Visual Artist of the Year in 2018 for his exhibition Inlight organized by ASÍ Art Museum. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the National Gallery of Iceland,Reykjavik Art Museum, Scandinavia House in New York, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany, Arario Gallery in Beijing, Liverpool Biennial in the UK, Tromsø Center For Contemporary Art in Norway, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and BergenKunsthall in Norway. He often collaborates with musical composers, resulting in intricate work, allowing the visual compositions to enchantingly merge with the musical ones in a single rhythmic and tonal whole.