Aura Satz: Sound Seam
09 December 2010
Drawing on Rainer Maria Rilke's text 'Primal Sound' (1919), which considers 'playing' the coronal suture of a human skull with a phonograph needle, Satz explores the body's surfaces as potential repositories of unheard sounds. Capturing these hidden voices, 'Sound Seam' turns to early recording technologies, with the grooves of records finding a corporeal mirror in the lines of the body.
Research and inspiration for the film came from a residency at UCL's Ear Institute, where Satz was based throughout 2009-10. Viewers are drawn through the mouths of gramophone horns into a hypnotic sequence of imagery taken from auditory anatomy and sound recording technology, with the groove-like forms of highly magnified stereocilia and cochlea played against microscopic close-ups of gramophone grooves.
The soundtrack is a dense narrative comprising two voices, pre-empting, echoing and overlapping one another, as they reveal a forensic love story. Music, composed by Aleks Kolkowski, derives from a gramophone needle tracing the meandering furrow line where a skull is joined and the otoacoustic emissions produced by the ear. More than a hundred of these recordings have been written and overwritten onto wax cylinder or records to create unexpected scratches, glitches, loops and faint echoes.
Aura Satz says: "'Sound Seam' gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past."
Lucy Shanahan, Curator at Wellcome Collection, says: "Aura Satz has given us a haunting and cross-sensory love story. Appropriately for Wellcome Collection, 'Sound Seam' offers us an entirely new vision of our own bodies."
A small publication with contributions from Steven Connor and Tom McCarthy will be available during the exhibition.
'Sound Seam' runs as a single screen projection in the Forum at Wellcome Collection from 9 December 2010 to 16 January 2011.
Click through the gallery below to view a series of stills from the film.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
Media contact
Tim Morley
Senior Media Officer
T 020 7611 8612
E
t.morley@wellcome.ac.uk
Aura Satz is a recipient of a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. 'Sound Seam' is the first Trust-funded arts project with a stand-alone display at Wellcome Collection.
Aura Satz (born Barcelona, Spain, 1974) lives and works in London. She completed a practice/theory PhD in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where she held a Henry Moore post-doctoral fellowship between 2002 and 2004. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Language, exhibition and live event, VIVID, Birmingham (2010); Locate, Jerwood Space, London (2010); Turntable Tableau, ICA, London (2010); I Am Anagram, Barbican, London (2010); Automatic Ensemble performance, Church of St Leonhard (Leonhardskirche), Basel & Museum of Music Automatons, Seewen (2009), Glissolalia, Soundtrap III commission, installation and live event, Beaconsfield Gallery, London (2008); and Automamusic, film screening and talk at Photographer's Gallery, London (2008). Aura is a Fellow and Lecturer at the London Consortium. During 2009-10 she was artist-in-residence at the Ear Institute, UCL.
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