Yolande Harris “Pink Noise/Fishing for Sound”
Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Dump Time / Artists
Yolande Harris (UK/NL): “Pink Noise/Fishing for Sound”, 2010 (Still)
Pink Noise / Fishing for Sound
Sound performance
Yolande Harris’ sound scores, installations, and performances render the unheard and the unheard of of our ecosphere audible. Using new technologies they make new sound worlds accessible which up to now lay beyond the human ear and make us progressively aware of the unconscious and repressed in our engineered living environment: for example the “crazy” noise man produces in the oceans and in space. Her performance “Pink Noise / Fishing for Sound” combines sound recordings the artist herself took using underwater microphones in a marine reserve in Spain with materials of marine research, music used in the psycho-therapeutic treatment of stress as well as sound data of satellites orbiting the earth. “Pink Noise” is a technical term denoting a kind of background noise of electronic appliances but also of natural phenomena like waterfalls. Harris uses this term in an unspecific and ironic way. With it she hints at the water surface, we see in her video, glimmering in pink and turquoise, referring to the fact that underneath this surface hell has broken loose: be it maritime traffic that makes incredible noise, as we can hear, even in a marine reserve, be it the inaudible sound of fish communicating: pure magic in a dreamscape. Yolanda Harris’ performance connects, on a sound level, microcosm and macrocosm, and lets us experience that man is part of a much more complex and rich world than we usually are able to appreciate. As in psychoanalysis, man is shown as part of some larger context knocking him off the pedestal he put himself on.