Ground (2013), TWEAKS, Nordiska akvarellmuséet
Explosion clock (2013), Doc Lounge, Stora teatern, Göteborg
Bokstäverna (2159 A4-pages. Inkjet print, 2013), Karlskrona Konsthall
Right hand - Left hand, (one channel video with split stereo sound, 2012) purchased by Göteborgs konstmuseum, 2013 © Göteborgs konstmuseum
The Goldberg variation / 13 hour sunrise, Konstfrämjandet Örebro, 2012 (Sound (12 hours 25 minutes) / HD-video (12 hours 48 minutes))
The Centre of silence, Kalmar konstmuseum, 2010. Voice (interleaved by silence, sinuswave and white noise). White filter on window.
This site contains a selection of work; 2010-2013.
More info + cv: download PORTFOLIO | CONTACT
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UPCOMING: Arltline digital festival, Karlskron, may 2013 // Svilova.org (solo), Göteborg, juni 2013 // Opening perrmanent soundinstallation, Röselidskolan, Lerum, august 2013 // Kulturhuset Borgen (solo), Gislaved, december 2013 // Konstepidemin (solo), Göteborg, mars 2014
RECENT: Nordiska Akvarellmuséet, TWEAKS, grupputställning mars 2013 // Doc Lounge (screening), Storan, Göteborg, 12/3 2013 // Karlskrona Konsthall (solo), opening 2013-01-26 // contribution to www.lastdaysofanalogue.com // Göteborgs konstmusem, I dialog med samlingarna (recension) // contribution to Peter Eccher: SLUTRAPPORT 2012:1, Galleri box // The sound of IT 3, Garage 4141, San Diego 2012-08-18 // June feature culturehall.com
Jesper Norda (b. 1972) has a background as a musician but half way trough his training to become a composer he changed into visual art. In 2002 he graduated with an MA from Konsthögskolan Valand in Gothenburg. Since then he has been working both with music and visual art. In both art forms with the same artistic consistency. In his visual art practice he expands the conceptual base into simple spatial operations made up of objects, text or light, sometimes linked to popular culture and sometimes linked to entirely personal experiences.
”A main thread in his artistry is a constant questioning of the borderlines between sound and silence. The visual and the sounding
materials are juxtaposed in conceptually challenging ways. Even if his works look and sound quite differently from theirs, he is probably
the Swedish sound artist that is closest to the conceptual tradition of artists like La Monte Young, John Baldessari and Sol LeWitt. In th
focusing on the real and factual, in the reduction of expressions down to only a few, where there arises a friction between the room and
the emptiness. But the complexity that is the effect of this has not so much to do with theoretical questions, it gains it strength from an
everyday listening, a communicating address, not least noticeable in the many works that take text as its starting point.” - Magnus Haglund
All the letters in King James Bible. In original order, spacing between each letter, no capital letter, no punctuation.
All chapter and verse indications are removed. The words of the bible reduced to sheets of abstract patterns, varying in intensity.
Part of solo exhibition Karlskrona konsthall 2013 / review / more images / TV-spot (SVTplay)
This piece was installed in three adjacent rooms on the 5th floor of the Gothenburg Museum of Art. These rooms mostly contains religious art from 1400-1600. The video was displayed in the center room. The sound in this work is based on JS Bach’s, Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland, in a piano transcription by F. Busoni.The part of the music that is played by the right hand is heard through a speaker in the right room, the part played by the left hand is heard through a speaker in the left room. The video consists of an extreme closeup of some piano keys, trembling by the touch of the pianist. When facing the video in the middle room, the sound is “whole”, when you move to one of the other rooms you experience the split of the sound. When standing close to the left speaker, the music played by the left hand rings out on its own, lonely and fragile, the music played by the right hand is heard only very faint, from the distance. And vice versa.
”My first composition professor Ole Lützow-Holm said in an interview, ”the melody is the vibrating thought”. I read this interview right before I would start my education at the college of music... but I can not recall me ever asking him about the meaning of it? In any case, I have carried that sentence with me ever since, sometimes it will come to me when I am not sure of what I am doing, sometimes when I am having a hard time trying to start up a new project. And now it comes to me when I am supposed to write something about my work at the 5th floor at Göteborgs konstmuseum.
However, this work is not so much about thought, it is mostly just body. And the visitor’s presence that binds something together that has been torn apart.” / J.N.
The Goldberg Variation is based on JS Bach's works Goldberg Variations. Each note / impact is played every two seconds. The dynamics are equalized, all drama and musical direction is removed. The original work is about 30 minutes, this version is 12 hours and 25 minutes.
13 hour sunrise: a black surface where a line of 33 pixels turn white every two seconds. From left to right, top to bottom.
A horizon and a room that very slowly gets brighter.
"The new works by Jesper Norda currently presented at Konstfrämjandet Örebro revolves around the concept of time, or rather the interstices, those that we constantly experience but never think about. Using methods as printed pages with all the seconds of a day and night, where the blackness of the ink varies according to the solar power, we are made aware of these gaps. By converting one medium to another we get insight into the invisible but essential components that create the space that we exist in, and in particular the perceptual process that we experience it with. Abstract substances often form the backbone of Jesper's work, such as the frequency of a sound wave and how it affects us, but especially the time it takes for a sound wave to travel, the vibrations it creates or the traces after a sound has subsided. The silence is as important as the sound. The illusion only illustrates reality. With a parallel career as a sound producer and composer with three solo albums behind him, Jesper's sensitivity to the rhythm and the silence in between is a detailed game of pulling apart and putting together. A calculated order re-organizes experiences to clockworks, where mechanically depicted words create mental images, or where every note becomes deserted and left to echo out alone, accompanied by a sunrise that lasts for 13 hours. Reduced to abstraction and the colors black and white, the room lights up, slowly and patiently, pixel by pixel. Time is eminently physical, and no moment is ever the same. Everything changes, all the time, with the tremendous power of a progressive movement."
Sofia Mavroudis, www.curareart.com
This piece was comissioned by Kalmar konstmuseum: a solo exhibition in the main hall that would contain sound only. A man is speaking about the room, the measurements of the room, the amount of air molecules, the weight of the air. The voice describes how the air molecules behave differently when exposed to different kind of soundwaves. He speaks about the intense air pressure in the room, the intense air pressure in the cranium of the listener and the balance between those two spaces: the state we call silence.
"What about doing nothing? Just be where you are, in your room, with the thoughts coming and
going. It’s kind of what we do, all the time, isn’t it? Like right now, when you are reading this text?
There are obvious links between Jesper Norda’s sound installation The Centre of Silence, created for an exhibition at Kalmar Art Museum 2009, and Alvin Lucier’s 1969-classic I’m Sitting in a Room. The two text pieces both use the factual information about the room where the works are performed as starting point for a series of minimal variations. But where the room’s ambience in Alvin Lucier’s case give the sounds an increasingly thick and complex texture, it becomes a conceptual ambience in Jesper Norda’s radical transformation of the material conditions. It stays the same, but it never feels the same. The effect is somehow the complete opposite to Alvin Lucier’s work. By thinning out it becomes complex.
You are there, at the centre of the piece, with a voice reading a formal text telling about the geometrical dimensions of the room and how the ears will react to changes in sound and resonance. But the neutral voice and the dry character of the text will slowly create a tension in the thinking about the piece, a sense of drama. A multitude of rooms will open up. The mysterious effect of the sober aesthetic and the reduced set of expressions is a peculiar and even melodic romanticism. You listen carefully and suddenly you hear the most wonderful harmonies. Where do they come from?
This paradox of using seemingly boring and non-agitated text materials to bring about a personal presence, characterize several of Jesper Norda’s works, for example two of his latest installation pieces, both from 2009: Resist With All Your Heart and Microgram of Light. In the first work a short text is repeated many, many times – ”Stay in a place infected with truth and resist with all your heart” – but for every repetition the word truth is replaced with another word. In the second one a light projector is directed to a big print consisting of an extremely long series of zeros, 17 521 zeros after one another, ending with the figures and letters ”123 microgram of light”.
Jesper Norda started as a composer, but changed direction while he was studying in the composition class at the Music Academy in Gothenburg in the end of the 90s and switched to the Art Academy in the same town for his master degree. A main thread in his artistry since then has been a constant questioning of the borderlines between sound and silence. The visual and the sounding materials are juxtaposed in conceptually challenging ways. Even if his works look and sound quite differently from theirs, he is probably the Swedish sound artist that is closest to the conceptual tradition of artists like La Monte Young, John Baldessari and Sol LeWitt and the reductionism of musicians like Toshimaru Nakamura, Sachiko M and Taku Sugimoto.
Several of Jesper Norda’s works play with the concept of silence. For example the sound installation Tear Gravity from 2005, where two loudspeaker membranes were put on the floor of a gallery, vibrating slowly like heart or a lung, but the frequence making them move – 0,3 Hz – much lower than the human ear can hear (the average human can hear sounds between 20 Hz and 16,000 Hz). Or Field of Love (Hommage à Dimitrios K) from 2007 where an extremely strong bass loop was played on a big PA-system buried 2 feet under the ground; the best position to hear any of the bass tones was to lie down on the grass and listen with an ear to the ground. This literally subconscious underground music materialized as vibrations in the body and in the field where it was played.
When asked about what kind of quality he looks for in a piece, Jesper Norda anwers: exactitude. He wants his works to be as singular and clear as possible, and so pedagogically plain that they border on the abstract and incomprehensible.
This is the enigma of sound art. The attention to what is going, both in the presence and in the absence of sounds, brings the work right to the centre of silence. And one of the best ways to achieve this is to do nothing."
Magnus Haglund
Catalogue (swedish/english). Texts by Marie Norin and Magnus Haglund.