GradCAM PhD Researcher Martijn Tellinga’s installation, ‘songlines II’, will be on display at Zone2Place Amsterdam. Below you can read the pamphlet information in relation Martijn, his work, and this installation.

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Songlines are invisible pathways crossing all over the Australian continent, used to navigate distances of sometimes hundreds of kilometers by means of song. While moving, songs sung in certain sequence provide bearing to the singing traveler, describing locations of (former) landmarks or (super) natural phenomena.

“Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the totemic being who wandered over the continent, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path – birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes – and so singing the world into existence.” – Bruce Chatwin

Tellinga’s recent installation works explore the idea that within a landscape, experience of place and surrounding comes about through perceiving and creating resonance. Through a partly poetic, partly scientific reading of the acoustic resonances of a given space, these works attempt to make those resonances palpable as an extension of architecture and traversable as a musical and experiential plane.

Five pairs of aligned speaker drivers have been installed, bridging the different dimensions of the space. Each pair has been assigned an electronic pure tone of which the frequency is proportionate to the physical distance between two opposing speakers. This causes the space to respond and naturally reinforce and diffuse the quietly projected tones: the space appears to hum omnipresently in unison with the tones at its intrinsic pitches (informed by architectural shape and size). A constantly shifting interval of two tones can be heard, slowly scanning the resonant spectrum of the room. Gentle physical movement through the space reveals a panorama of audible crests, slopes and meeting points.

Recordings of a sustained singing voice occassionaly tune with a tone, causing acoustic ripples and melodic resonances to appear at specific points in the room. The voice, because of its rich timbre, instantly sings body and location into the static abstracted landscape, connecting the invisibly traversing songlines within the space.

Maria Antonia Company Morell – voice

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Martijn Tellinga (1974, Netherlands) is an artist, composer and occasional performer. His practice enfolds and integrates elements of concert, installation and performance art. Drawn from a reduced formalist-seeming vocabulary, his work centers on the exploration of sound & listening to express ideas of space, place and process: their reciprocal production, contextual intertwining, and potential as a perceptual, performative and social medium. It includes a wide variety of conceptual actions and chance operations, probing the emergent field between intended and accidental occurrences.

He performs and exhibits his work worldwide, lectures and works in residence. He is one of the curators for the long running series DNK-Amsterdam and visiting professor at the Central Academy for Fine Arts in Beijing and ArtEZ in Arnhem. He is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media in Dublin. He lives and works in Amsterdam.

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