Åsa Helena Stjerna is a Swedish artist using sound and listening as her artistic modes of exploration. Through her site-specific installations, she explores sound’s potential, making the embedded conditions and underlying narratives connected to a situation perceivable, drawing connections between past and present, local and global, as well as human and more-than human. By this she seeks to reframe the act of listening, evoking a sensibility of places as complex ecologies.

Stjerna shows us a documentary showing the process and creation of a sound piece formed from sonifying data. She compiles measurements of the North Atlantic current, the semi-diurnal tide, the diurnal tide and the ionosphere from the Faroe Islands of the past 8 years and speeds up each data pattern 9 million times to achieve audible gestures. The tides were translated into drone like qualities while the ionosphere was split up into a glittering granulated sound texture. The North Atlantic Current wasn’t used as a sound source and instead was used to control the sound textures and spatial positioning of the sounds from the ionosphere and the tides in the opera foyer where the piece was installed. Data sonification is something I want to get into. Representing something that otherwise would be a bunch of numbers with sounds is an interesting way to visualise and approach making cause more impactful to the average person who might view your installation. Something they can metaphorically visualise through movement, like something visual (a graph), auditory(Data Sonification) and physical(an object or sculpture) will have more of an impact in conveying a message than numbers.