Soon the Visual Voltage exhibition has reached its last week in Berlin and is to move on to next stop. Closing time near, but still some days left for you who haven’t been there yet.
The opening of the amplified extension, the performance and the pecha kucha attracted a pretty good audience, as can be read in the previous blog, but people seem to find the way to Nordische Botschaften even before and after. The Power Aware Cord and the Flower Lamp have their deserved audience but also another installation, Mezzo, attracts people by its effective interaction.
Mezzo is a piece by the Swedish artists Tore Nilsson and Steven Dixon. Nilsson is currently teacher at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm and Dixon professor at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. They have been collaborating in many pieces before, but Mezzo was created for the Visual Voltage exhibition.
The installation consists of a number of small monitors showing different images and short film clips, that Dixon/Nilsson have collected, and that represent different forms of energy. These flickering monitors attract the viewer to step inside the installation. What happens then, is that the appearance of the viewer triggers a sound, a sound that both attract more spectators and that grows louder the more people that move within the installation.
It’s a noisy installation. The sound is created of recordings of the magnetic field around Venus. The concept suggests that there are many energy phenomena that we don’t regard as energy. Dixon and Nilsson plays with the concept, and create an interactive piece of art out if it, but some of the designers in the Visual Voltage Amplified have noticed the same thing and they discuss how these kinds of energy can be harvested and used. How? Go to the Felleshus at the Nordische Botschaften and find out yourself!