Sensing Streams – Holland Festival

Electromagnetic waves, we cannot hear them, but they are all around us all the time. They make everyday technologies like radio, telephones and the internet possible. In Sensing Streams, the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, together with the media artist Daito Manabe, render electromagnetic waves visible and audible. Antennas located in different parts of the room will pick up these waves, receiving mobile phone, Wi-Fi, digital television and radio signals in real-time. A computer then turns these into a live digital audio-visual work of art that will be shown on a large screen and played through multiple speakers. With hypnotic, constantly changing digital sounds and visuals, Sakamoto and Manabe show us an invisible but essential infrastructure that is one of the many human footprints on this planet.

The composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is particularly interested in everyday sounds. He has recorded ambient street sounds and travelled to the North Pole to record the subtle sounds of melting ice. For Sensing Streams, together with the media artist Daito Manabe, he explored the sonic world of electromagnetic waves, which are inaudible to the human ear.

They will turn these waves, which are everywhere all around the world as a kind of sonic pollution, into hypnotic digital sounds and visuals and make the audience aware of a presence that often goes unnoticed. Different locations With Sensing Streams, the artists will render visible the electromagnetic waves between 80MHz and 5,2GHz that make mobile phone technology possible on a large screen. Besides the waves present all around the audience at any moment, they will also use recordings of waves in an underground (subway) passage in Japan. By using these alongside the live data, they demonstrate how these waves fluctuate depending on the time and location. Interactive The presence and use of mobile phones affects the sounds and visuals and shows how the electromagnetic fields in the room are in a constant state of flux. Besides waves that are always present in the background, the installation will also render visible a type of ecosystem that is created through the presence and participation of the audience. Electromagnetic waves? We know about oceanic waves, but waves also exist as electromagnetic currents. Light is made up of photons, and photons are electromagnetic waves. Light, radio waves and X-rays are all forms of the same electromagnetic waves. The only difference between these forms of radiation is the waves’ vibrational frequency. All types of electromagnetic radiation can be described as a spectrum that stretches from short waves with a high vibrational rate, like X-rays, to long waves with a low vibrational rate, like radio waves. Rainbows reveal a small piece of this spectrum, from red light with slightly longer waves to green and blue light with slightly shorter waves.

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by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Daito Manabe courtesy Sapporo International Art Festival Executive Committee

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