Volumes Inverted

Volume Inverted Ruin: Kinetik Loudspeaker Instrument with Electronic Sound – Metal Case, Tweeters, Motor, Sound | Volume Inverted Lagoon: Loudspeaker Instrument with Electronic Sound – Aluminium Case, Horns, Sound

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Photo: Thomas Aurin

For his installation Volumes Inverted, Jan St. Werner uses two custom-made loudspeaker instruments that generate clear sound reflections of the surroundings. One of the loudspeaker instruments rotates slowly around its own axis in the center of the ruin, producing ever new sound artifacts through the mixture of direct sound and spatial reflections. The other instrument stands on a pole in the wetlands of the lagoon and emits sound beams towards the island and its buildings.

Complex reflections cause the sound particles to spread over a wide area. The result is an acoustic exchange between inside and outside, which calls into question one’s own location and requires spatial orientation to be readjusted.

In Volumes Inverted, Werner uses high-frequency acoustic spectra that are modulated in pitch and phase. This frequency range is usually occupied by birds, frogs, and crickets. If the acoustic pressure is high enough, the ear can produce acoustic emissions from the inner ear (otoacoustic emissions) as a distortion product - artifacts that manifest themselves as hallucinations in the auditory system. These phenomena are also known as ghost sounds.

The correlation between the ghost tones in the listener’s head and the movement of the partial tones in physical space can be experienced intuitively but remains unpredictable. Perception thus becomes a negotiation; we are simultaneously both inside and outside the sound.
Here Werner deals with the idea that a thing happens at one time but is experienced in different ways depending on location. In addition to perspective, he also experiments with material, architecture, distance, and scale.

The word “volume” is understood here in the sense of the three-dimensional unit of measurement for spatial fullness, which determines the size of closed buildings or vessels. Jan St. Werner’s work is an extension of this concept, an attempt to relativize the conventional concept of space and to understand it in terms of a cybernetic understanding as a dynamic control loop.