MIKAEL ERICSSON / 2012
Site-specific sound installation
Harp Art Lab, Harplinge windmill, Sweden.
Kvarnofoni / Millophonia
Mikael Ericsson began the work in 2010 with the goal to change the identity of the windmill by using the sails and machinery to grind sound, instead of grains. The idea was to combine the windmill, the pipe organ and the player piano for a site-specific sound art work that used the entire seven-story building.
Millophonia premiered in the summer of 2012 and it is since then a permanent sound installation at Harp Art Lab, generating a great attraction force, both for new and returning visitors.
The sails, of the windmill, are running two enormous bellows that are supplying a modified pipe organ with air. The sound is controlled by a pneumatic mechanism that operates the pipe organ action via piano-rolls that are preprogrammed by the artist. This procedure is 100% handmade by cutting, punching and stitching it all together to feed Millophonia with fresh sound art.
frequencies is a performative installation comprising self-built robotic bells that sound compositions for each space they are placed in. The work draws on the various historical roles that bells have played; as an organizing rhythm, as a signifier of spatial and supernatural boundaries, and as a communication channel for encoded meanings. As a distributed formation, the installation creates a sculptural frame between listeners and the vibrating metals, inviting both focal and diffuse modes of listening. Combining both acoustic principles and digital & computer-controls, the experimental instruments enact a form of time-marking that suggest a mosaic of moments rather than the linear passage of time
Location: Media Campus of Hochschule Darmstadt University, Germany for the Global Composition 2018
