ArtHouse: Sound of Colour show

An interactive digital art show that takes you on a sensory journey ArtHouse Jersey’s latest exhibition, The Sound of Colour, takes visitors on a sensory journey through the work of four international artists each offering a particular take on how we perceive and experience the world around us.

Drawing inspiration from playful digital exhibitions in the halls of Tate Modern, the show features immersive installations and interactive projections, from bold, psychedelic ‘liquid’ projections that respond to the music of Monteverdi, to invisible weather patterns and microscopic insect sounds, the show employs technology to play with sound and light, creating illusions and sensory stimulation.

This is a show designed to appeal to everyone. It’s interactive and sensory, making it an ideal outing for young people and families as well as an alternative and stimulating way for people to spend their lunch hour in town. ArtHouse Jersey are encouraging people to
come and take colourful and memorable photos for social media at the show using the hashtag #thesoundofcolour and tagging @arthousejersey.

The show opens to the public on Wednesday 12th October 2022 at ArtHouse Jersey at Capital House.

Director of ArtHouse Jersey, Tom Dingle, said: “This is a fun show that experiments with new technologies. It’s visceral and stimulates the senses, tapping into something more instinctive than just an intellectual response to what we see and hear. There is no right or wrong way to respond to a show like this. It’s a sensory experience that sees talented artists put technology to creative use. Bold, colourful, interactive and filled with sound, we hope everyone will come and have their horizons expanded.”

The artists

Kimatica

Experimenting with body-scanning technology, ‘Relax and Release’ by Kimatica uses camera sensors to create a video wall in which the gallery viewer can see their shape and movements extended into projected colours and shapes. Echoing early digital art experiments in dance, this fun, interactive piece shows the potential of such technology to be used expressively in a context where body-scanning is increasingly being used for monitoring, testing and controlling data held by private or public companies and governments.

Semiconductor

Focusing on the visual and three-dimensional representation of scientific research, through short films, public art and gallery installations, Semiconductor have produced an extraordinary body of work that translates, into artistic form, often invisible aspects of the natural world, from geology to weather patterns, to the sub-atomic nature of matter itself. For ‘The Sound of Colour’, they present two works that give pictorial colour and form to complex phenomena. In ‘Parting the Waves’ (2017) visual waveforms manifest the interactions of sub-atomic particles to visualise the workings of the ‘quantum realm’. ‘The Sound of Microclimates’ (2004) visually presents the audible frequencies of unusual weather patterns recorded in a series of environments across Paris.

Burak Özdemir

‘Vertigo’ is an inter-century collaboration, cross-referencing the work of contemporary Berlin-based Turkish composer Burak Özdemir and the sublime seventeenth century compositions of Monteverdi. In this space of dialogue, Özdemir attempts to construct an experience he describes as an ‘elastic, liquid time’, in which the music not only moves onwards, but also backwards. Constructed with a visual language that translates, much like synesthesia, each note of the music into a palette of colours and shapes. The created environment attempts to structure a ‘balanced chaos’ that lifts and disorientates the listener/viewer in a delicate meditation of time and lost time.

Adam Basanta

Canadian artist Adam Basanta plays on the notion of the ubiquitous white earbud headphones which create an interior sonic environment into which the wearer can retreat from the external world. In this personalised sonic bubble, the headphones function as a “do not disturb” sign. In ‘Curtain (white)’ a 3m long curtain sections the gallery space visually and sonically. Patterns of white noise, a sound often used in sleep machines, sweep across the curtain. On closer listening, the sound mass breaks down into 24 channels of individual soundtracks. Despite the synthetic production techniques, the overall sound evokes organic memories of waves, wind, rain, and insects.

History of the ‘Sound of colour’

The Sound of Colour is a series by ArtHouse Jersey that explores how our senses understand, experience and interact with the world around us. The series began in 2019 with a study of the idea of synesthesia; a condition in which an impression on one of the senses triggers an impression on another, such as when music, numbers or letters are experienced as colours. The Sound of Colour 2022 presents a series of artworks by four artists that attempt to shift our relation and response to the physical and material world through technological experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration, to make visible (and audible) aspects of the physical world that otherwise remain unseen.