Wolfgang Dorninger

Instalação Consertante (installation concertante)

When I first came to Nodar I had the idea just to stick to the video documentary but right then I was fascinated by the environment, by the river. I like the duality between technology and nature. Where I come from I don’t feel linked anymore to nature. In Nodar, I felt technology is still linked to nature, while in my area the river has turned into a channel and the water comes to my house filtered without the mineral components that nature gives. In Nodar the technique is close to nature, nature is still nature but here and there people use the techniques, which are very old and highly skilled, to bring water into the crops, to their life. So in this place I could see the past and the future. These are the sounds I liked to catch.

I thought: my piece has to happen on the river. What I wanted to do was a kind of an “installation concertante” where I would mix layers of virtual realities out of water sounds and water sources, so that people who would come up would have this one time happening/performance where they could visualize their lives with water. All the sounds were from Nodar except for the last one which came from the sea. So all the sounds I brought in were collected in people’s memory.In the silent part of their minds they would get images out of their lives, from different rivers. It’s a dialogue between acoustic sources and visualization. This is why I went to the river because at a certain time you think all these sounds are a part of the river. When I press stop in the end, you would think something is wrong with the river, but then you realize all that was like an acousmatic wall of sound, a soundscape, it is not there, it is behind a curtain, in a virtual reality, but the story I tell is still in the water.

I compose, I’m not doing phonography. What I do is a sound installation where I compose different images and I play with them. I used several digital techniques to create different soundscapes. Initially I wanted to capture the sounds from the underwater, but then I just wanted different water singing, let’s say I wanted to shape the internal sound out of the water. For example, here when I hear water I hear all these reflections, I hear the space. So I cut away the space with noise reduction, with psycho acoustic filtering, and with equalization. So this is the first part: taking the phonographic record. The second part of this process is transposing my experience editing the sound where I had imaginations ofmy water world and bring it into the story. A fourth of the piece is me.

Wolfgang Dorninger lives and works in Linz and Vienna, Austria. His main artistic expression focuses in sound art and experimental music ranging from sound-installation to concert, multimedia and radio art. He teaches at the Art-University in Linz, Austria and composes music fortheatre, dance and film.