Thresholds

Thresholds is a multichannel sound and video installation piece commissioned in 2018 by the Institute for Sound and Music Berlin for the ISM Hexadome.

ISM Hexadome is designed to reflect the progress of our time and the artists among us pushing the boundaries between technological possibilities and artistic spaces. During March – April 2018, 9 individual and collaborative installations and performances will be presented by outstanding international contemporary artists from the sound, immersive art, and visual disciplines in the Atrium of Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau. Within the ISM Hexadome, each work opens a door into a world crafted in sonic and visual detail, demonstrating the significance and power of spatialization for sound in complete harmony with immersive visual art and architecture

Project description

Thresholds creates a transsensorial space for storytelling on topics of territory, recognition and memory. Together musician Lara Sarkissian and artist Jemma Woolmore craft an immersive experience from aural and physical architectures; playing with disorientation, stability, unrest, familiarity and recollection.The piece is an ambient electronic landscape referencing Armenian music, field recordings and churches (both in its sonic and physical form); as the architecture of churches have often been designed with the intentions of acoustic ecology and spatial experiences in mind. The score collages elements of voices, hymns, instruments; holding space for modern day Armenian narratives tied to uprooted ancestral pasts [and present].
The hexadome screens become a landscape to be navigated and divided, creating symbolic borders that are enforced, blurred or dissolved throughout the work. Patterns emerge that appear to both isolate and encompass, generating complex and unfamiliar territories, exploring the fragile boundary between Utopia and Dystopia.

About Hexadome

The ISM Hexadome  is a newly designed audiovisual architecture that creates an immersive 360° environment combining the ‘Klangdom’, an advanced multi-channel speaker configuration created by ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics within a visual projection architecture designed by digital media studio, Pfadfinderei.  For the premier event series in Berlin at the Martin Gropius Bau nine separate works were commissioned by a range of sound and visual artists.  The ISM Hexadome exhibition is scheduled to travel internationally taking these nine works and adding new commissions along the way.