JACOB KIRKEGAARD
Sabulation | Berlin | 2010 | 5m excerpt
sound & video work | black & white
"He tried thinking of something else. When he closed his eyes, a number of long lines, flowing like sighs, came floating toward him. They were ripples of sand moving over the dunes. The dunes were probably burned onto his retina because he had been gazing steadily at them for some twelve hours. The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the "sabulation" of the Roman Empire...." Excerpt of the English adaptation of the novel 'Woman in the Dunes' by Kobo Abe, 1962. The word Sabulation refers to the ancient Roman city Sabratah, today a deserted ruin by the Mediterranean sea in Libya
This work consists of sound and video footage of the so-called Singing Sands or Booming Dunes in the deserts of Oman.
Jacob Kirkegaard is a Danish artist who focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Using unorthodox recording tools, including accelerometers, hydrophones and home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard captures and contextualizes hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments : a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself.
Based in Berlin, Kirkegaard is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. Over the last fifteen years, Kirkegaard has presented his works at exhibitions and at festivals and conferences throughout the world such as Club Transmediale in Berlin, James Cohan Gallery and Diapason in New York as well as Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles and Museum of Contemorary Art in Denmark. He has released five albums (mostly on the British label Touch). Jacob is also a member of the sound art collective freq_out.
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