Eirik Brandal is an artist and composer based in Stavanger and Riga. While originally studying music composition, his work has shifted towards electronic sound sculptures, looking to uncover the intrinsic beauty of circuits. By laying the circuits out in an architectural fashion, their context is changed from being functional objects to becoming objects of art. Sound and lights are used as a means to create a sense of transparency between the audience and the internal processes of the sculptures, with the aim of giving the sculptures the characteristics of independent communicative entities.

Brandal’s work appears to be influenced by Peter Vogel, an artist whose creations I’m also a fan of. However, I believe Brandal’s sculptures place a more considerate and thought out approach in the visual layout of his circuits. Vogel and Brandal’s installations both visually share similarities to the abstract minimalist aesthetic of Piet Mondrian’s later works. The perfect straight lines and the simple layout of parts and components that only serve a purpose in the functionality of the circuit further illustrates this. I believe this can also be heard in the sounds produced by the circuit. The components interact with each other to produce the purest and most fundamental sounds possible using basic electronically synthesised waveforms, just as Mondrian’s compositions attempted to return to the basics of painting(block colours, straight lines, 90 degree angles) through Neo-Plasticism.

“As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form. The new plastic idea cannot therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation – this new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.”

Piet Mondrian, ‘Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art’