JACOB KIRKEGAARD

4 Rooms

4 Rooms is a sound work based on recordings made in four abandoned rooms within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine.

The sound of each room was created by recording twelve minutes of its own ambient sound, then playing that back into the same room while recording it again—repeating the process up to ten times. With each iteration, the room’s resonant frequencies gradually emerged, shaped by its unique acoustics.

This technique references Alvin Lucier’s 1970 work I am sitting in a room, but unlike Lucier’s use of his own spoken voice, Kirkegaard introduced no external sound. Instead, he left the rooms during each recording to work with the ambient sounds of the rooms themselves.

The recordings were made in Chernobyl, October 2005. 4 Rooms was released on Touch on April 26, 2006 - on the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Aion is the audio-visual version of 4 Rooms. See more under Works.

Jacob Kirkegaard - INTO THE ZONE

A video of Jacob Kirkegaard's field trip to Chernobyl documenting the making of Aion and 4 Rooms. Filmed by Sarah Kirkegaard in October 2005. Thanks to Rimma Kiselitsa (In Memoriam)

The four rooms recorded: A gym, swimming pool, auditorium (all in Pripyat) and a church in Krasno

A Hunt for the Sound of the Haunting

Written for the catalogue on occasion of Aion (the audio visual version of 4 Rooms) being shown at MOCA, Roskilde, Denmark

By Stine Hebert, 2006

AION is a project that grew out of a wish to find something. This “something” was perhaps a rather undefined goal from the beginning, considering the prospect that there might not be anything at all to unearth. Jacob Kirkegaard set out on an investigation to hunt the potential sounds emanating from four carefully selected, abandoned spaces in the ‘Zone of Exclusion’ in Chernobyl, in the former USSR (now Ukraine). What must have begun as a desire to listen, a curiosity to listen to locations once constituting the physical core of a catastrophe, ended up as a chance to give voice to that “something”- the memories of the events of a nuclear disaster.

Listening to a Space

The methodological aspects of the AION installation hold a strong reference to one of the famous sound art works created by the American composer Alvin Lucier (b.1931). In 1969 Lucier recorded a piece called ‘I’m Sitting in a Room’ based on a very simple system: Lucier sits in a room and reads a text aloud, which in a self-explanatory manner unfolds what his piece is about and how it is technically constructed. Lucier’s reading of the text is recorded and played back into the room 32 times and each time re-recorded. His voice gradually dissolves into a singing drone, oscillating according to the rhythm of his speech, and though the process takes a long time to elaborate itself, every cycle slowly changes the piece. AION relates to a very different situation from the one Lucier bases his work on, but through the same technique of recording and playing back into the room, both pieces accomplish similar astounding and unexpected results, their intentions being quite remote from one another.

Unlike Lucier, Kirkegaard has not contributed any sound to his recordings but rather attempted to remove himself as much as possible whilst the recordings were taking place. Nevertheless, AION does not just reverberate the sounds and visuals from the rooms whilst the recordings were going on; rather it is an articulation of these spaces. AION is produced out of sonic and visual field recordings but is presented as a portrayal of the four rooms, as the recordings also ought to be regarded as readings of the aural and visual operations. Something is always lost, as well as gained, in recording processes, which raises the question of translation. Kirkegaard must be considered as the composer of this piece, despite it being the rooms that generate the unfolding sounds. The process of intercession affected by the recording equipment illustrates that the medium, as any other translation or representation, is not direct or innocent but always in fact mediating. The illusion is broken down for us by the faults in the regime of representation, but at the same time an awareness is created in embracing the resonance, opening an opportunity for something else to take place.

Giving Voice

A significant difference between the two works, besides Alvin Lucier donating his voice to interact with the room, is that Lucier’s idea seems to originate in the desire to annihilate his stuttering. Lucier is a stutterer and in the piece he explains how he wishes to overcome this aural sign of mistakes occurring in the flow; the sudden breaks that interrupt the fluency of communication and perhaps even function as a glitches. Lucier states in his text read aloud that his wish is “To rule out any irregularities my speech might have...”, which will give people a chance to listen to and instead engage with “the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech”. The architectural frames that constitute the room in which this piece is recorded hereby seem to become an instrument in themselves. Lucier’s voice sets the room into motion, and in the end there is only a ghost left of his statement in the repeated recordings. But his stutter still haunts him and regardless of the gradual disintegration of his voice, the stutter remains a rhythmic signature recognisable surprisingly long into the transformation process the piece goes through. As a strong contrast to the content of his speech, which is soon lost, it is only in the final cycles that the stammering ruptures are ultimately smoothed out into the pure abstraction of the resonance of the room.

Lucier’s piece explores the recording mechanism’s ability to produce something, which cunningly also removes attention from something crucial and embarrassing. Kirkegaard is instead interested in the premise of letting the sound stand on its own – though the idea certainly acknowledges his presence and interference as well as the recording mechanism’s intervention with the natural resonant frequencies of the different rooms. AION is motivated by a different outset than Lucier’s highly personal concern but they share the same unease of a ghostly presence. AION takes the starting point, not in something personal and private, but rather in one of the major tragedies which has occurred in recent human history and which received intense media coverage; the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that happened on April 26th in 1986. The outcome was dramatic as high-radiation hit the area, which forced an evacuation and a permanent relocation of the residents. Today the place is an abandoned territory and living there is illegal though some did move back to the contaminated zone.

The Chernobyl tragedy is an example of nuclear energy that went out of control: human beings expecting that they naively and without consequences could control the nature that had created them. The immediate and recognisable human losses were perhaps not that grand compared to other tragedies occurring elsewhere in the world, but the symbolic significance of the event was highly influential for the human species. Suddenly nature was speaking up and right back to us; giving us a warning sign of a dangerous escalation of human haughtiness.

Talking to the Zone

The nuclear disaster took place in the deserted rooms presented in AION, where traces of people’s sudden escape are still to be found and perhaps memorised. But have the memories of the catastrophic events somehow encrusted themselves in these abandoned rooms? One could argue that the architectural spaces function as embodiments of memories stored in those places, as they have been witnessing the incidents. The relation between matter and memory is hereby at the epicentre of this project; can the rooms speak of what has occurred here before?

It is debatable exactly what it is that makes the rooms sing. Or in other words, what creates the situation that provides people with a chance to listen and establish an opening for an understanding. Normally we consider intent to be revealed through the rhythmic structuring of a discourse and we generally connect repetitive messages with minimal expressive content. But in AION the experience is reversed; what on occasion begins as a weak and distant humming ends up in a brute and rusty cacophony of sounds through the repeated recordings. Kirkegaard has invited the abandoned spaces to sing and given us a chance to listen. If we permit ourselves to lend meaning to these sounds unfolding themselves in the installation, and in fact consider them potential energies brought out and about by the artistic intervention of the recordings, we receive a chance to participate in this story by merely listening to it disclose itself. A battlefield is constituted between the beholders or listeners and the spaces speaking up, and we have to open our ears if we want communication to flow. The sounds bend and give room, other times they push and crash. This sonic universe seems to be struggling but if we go along with the premise we can learn something about the course of history. In that case AION can be utilised as an allegory of the relation between nature and humanity and what happens when the power balance is out of control. Are the memories of such an experience layered in the abandoned territory of Chernobyl and is AION mapping these out? Memories are alive, and their nature is therefore performative; they reinvent themselves and are constantly reconstructed. This is similar to the repetitive structure comprising AION. Repetitions are not a denial of structure in an otherwise seemingly transparent system, nor are they a refrain. Something is added or produced in the process of what appears to be simple repetition, just like things can never be remembered directly but always and only through a detour. A detour that inevitably involves the setting and time we are located in right now whilst recollecting episodes and actions from the past. Assumptions of unmediated authenticity or clear cut memories must therefore be subverted, and the act of remembering instead considered as a process of creating an active production of meaning.

Remembering

One is then left with the questions about the possibility of recollecting something, despite the fact of not having been a part of it oneself, and about the existence of collective memory. By listening to and experiencing AION we are also reinterpreting the tragedy and taking part in an encounter between history and memory. AION seems to allow the beholder and listener to engage and enter into this zone, which is otherwise excluded and barred off, and letting us breathe simultaneously. Perhaps we are not recollecting but instead creating something in that process which gives room for the past experiences and events to live on. What was once an act of silent speech is transformed in AION into interference, a communication, or perhaps even a direct talk, if the listener participates as well.

‘I’m Sitting in a Room’ contains an element of something unstable introduced by Lucier’s stuttering voice, whereas in AION the unstableness of the past events disclose themselves in these recordings. The acoustic characteristics of the rooms are evoked in AION, though one can imagine that the sounds emitted from these spaces will not reverberate in the same way throughout time or be transmitted consistently. Just like the next generation of the population in the Western world will forget about this tragedy overshadowed by many new occurrences, the radioactivity of this sphere will also gradually decay and one day in the future be completely gone. While Lucier’s piece attempted to get rid of the haunting stuttering, Aion is working in order to emancipate the memories of the tragic events, and perhaps providing a chance for reconciliation. Both set out on a course generated by the desire to liberate the ghosts.

AIONIC DRONES

Listening to Silence on the Threshold of Eternity

Written for the Aion catalogue on occasion of the work being shown at MOCA, Roskilde, Denmark

By Sarah Kirkegaard, 2006

Carcasses of trees against heavy clouds. Concrete debris on burnt soil. An irradiated wasteland buried under lead and asphalt... One cannot but expect Chernobyl to represent the very nightmare of a nuclear Ground Zero. In the daylight of reality, however, the site of the infamous disaster turns out to bear more resemblance to a common graveyard. It is a peaceful place, and remarkably undead. And if it weren’t for the military checkpoints and the Geiger counter on the dashboard of the old Lada, our excursion to the so-called Zone of Exclusion would start off much like a holiday trip into an idyllic nature preserve. Instead of monochrome moon craters, there are endless rows of birch trees and pines rushing past the back seat window. A truly radiating explosion of autumnal colours under a vast blue sky: FOREST IS OUR BEAUTY, states a Hollywood-style signpost beside the empty road. From the front seat, Rimma (the guide) declares the area Europe’s largest wildlife sanctuary: wolves and wild horses included. Birds of prey are circling above the meadows, and as Kolya (the driver) forks off into the overgrown main road of a former village, we almost hit an enormous elk. Among the few remnants of Soviet times, and of human civilization generally, only the distant silhouette of the power plant reminds one that the teeming nature here is thriving not only on rain and sunlight but also on high doses of radioactivity. Though twenty years might be sufficient – for flora, fauna, and for the world public – to recover from the initial shock, contamination itself has a lot more staying power. The half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,110 years. About the same amount of time has passed since humans first occupied this land during the last Ice Age. But judging from the amounts of plutonium released by the calamity, this entire region might still be uninhabitable for human beings at a time when our entire species has already ceased to exist.

The explosion of reactor 4 of the USSR’s most productive power plant on April 26th 1986 was not the first accident of the Atomic Age, nor is it likely to be the last one. In relation to the many other catastrophes that have hit the globe during the last years, its immediate consequences seem almost negligible: According to the latest official study, published by the WHO in association with the World Bank and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the number of Chernobyl fatalities – that is, deaths from acute radiation sickness – amounts to a total of 56. At the same time, however, the very name of “Chernobyl” remains a synonym for “monstrous disaster”. More than just a foreboding of the possibility of human self-extinction, it represents one of the most fundamental apocalyptic milestones of our time. Two decades after the initial accident, its real dimensions confront us with a temporal paradox: The catastrophe is not past, for radiation went on invisibly - even when the fire had been extinguished and a sarcophagus had been built around the melted reactor core. Since the invisible danger evades our understanding, the catastrophe is not really present either. Nor does it leave much of an imaginable future, for the long-term consequences of the radioactive pollution exceed both scientific grasp and personal horizon. If history is measured as a succession of generations, and experienced as a passage of moments in a life-time, Chernobyl marks the end of history. It rings in the beginning of an infinite time beyond human existence: the rise of eternity. As an artistic attempt to assimilate this peculiar transcendental dimension in an audiovisual medium, AION draws on the matter of temporality in a very literal sense. Derived from the Greek ( αίώ means “age”, or “eternity”), it is a direct reference to that abstract dimension of time which exceeds our understanding and transcends all human existence. In the Bible, the term refers to the Messianic age and as such remains a matter of dispute: Nobody knows whether the kingdom of salvation is to last “forever”. In the ancient myths of Persians, Greeks, and Romans, αίώ is a deity in itself. A time-god with a lion’s head and a whip in his hand, he is encircled by a snake biting its own tail: Eternity as a standstill in motion – or in other words, a loop. In the four compositions of AION, with their repetitive rings of silence growing into resonant drones, one might perceive audible fragments of these seemingly infinite circles. The Chernobyl disaster, as Jacob (the artist) points out, can only be observed through time; and time, in turn, can be experienced through sound. As things start changing, slowly, something begins to manifest itself in the abandoned space: a hunch of a memory, a flickering of soul, a speculation. Based on the recordings of four empty spaces that were formerly rooms, AION is a methodical accumulation of supposed nothingness. But the spaces we visit are time capsules, and the absence they contain turns out to have a strong resonating voice: The denser the silence, the more can be heard. During the recordings at the Krasno village church, Rimma (the guide) sneaks in and sits down on the steep wooden stairs that lead up to the gallery with its brightly painted angels. Her sceptical expression softens as the stillness of time grows, with each new layer, into a fuller tone.

„I could hear the choir singing“, she says later, almost tearful with reverence. In Pripyat, the former model town next to the ower plant, the human dimension of the catastrophe manifests itself in a more material way. Devoured by wilderness, the monuments of Soviet times are crumbling, creaking, howling softly as the wind passes through the broken windows. The ghost-voices of the evacuees have long succumbed to the elements. „In ten years“, Kolya (the driver) predicts, “there will only be jungle left here.“ Even now, stalagmites and stalagtites are forming in Pripyat’s polyclinic, the site of the rehabilitation pool with its strangely industrial-looking orthopaedic machines. Inside the kindergarden with its dusty music room, much has remained the same, as if the children had left it only days ago. Tiny shoes and gasmasks litter the classroom floor; dolls and wooden blocks lie on the shelves. But much has also changed. Now there is rot, contaminated moss, rusting bed frames and paint falling away in great blisters and peels. Next to a faded Lenin poster, neglectful visitors have dropped an empty Marlboro box. From a visual perspective, too, Chernobyl’s most prominent feature lies in the absence of its people. Each one of the four rooms is a metaphorical tombstone of a past era; and to me (the spectator), AION reverberates with uncanny memories of their beautiful and mildewy dissolution. Eternity is only one side of what Chernobyl might stand for today; the other is simply: decay. AION offers four by thirteen minutes of experiences of a nuclear death – with each piece developing a characteristic form of dissolution. Maybe there is a final curtain, as in the auditorium in Pripyat, where the shadows descend on a broken piano among the shattered debris. After a last compressed clatter of leaves, a drone sets in with a huge bronze tone, while the room fades into darkness. Its final breath, the first recorded layer, is only a reminder of a past life: The show on the empty white platform must never go on.

In the gym, one is faced with a more alarming demise. The flickers of sunlight form a burning cross above a window with no view, announcing a speedy departure into an unknown purgatory. Like a reflection of the nuclear explosion that took place twenty years ago in the direct vicinity of this sore edifice, the haunting speckles of light on the black wall give a sense of anticipated danger, as vague and persistent as the memory of a smell. But when the emerging drone has risen to a threatening noise, the flames go out. Devoid of its function, the abandoned space has turned into a mouldy corpse.

At the swimming pool, a similar transition is achieved with the help of a digital effect: a slow extinction of life, as colour and contours fade away into nothingness. Waterdrops that sounded in reality like the counting of time are layered into a dense rhythmical pattern. But the image of the pool is leaking, leaking with radiation, just like the sarcophagus only half a mile away from here. In a dripdrop symphony of artificially accelerated amnesia, the fine tooth of radioactive frostbite is gnawing at the room until only a skeleton remains: in the true sense of the word, death in Chernobyl is simply an overexposure. Still, there remains a promise of resurrection. If the αίώ only starts after the fade-out of life’s colours, then the careful unraveling of sound and image in the village church of Krasno indicates that death might be the beginning, not the end. As each composition ends with a return to the first sound layer, a final salute is given to the dead body of the room, like a flower thrown into an open grave. Its spirit, whether it be eternal or finite, is to be captured and defined by the individual imaginations of the AION audience.

Aion is dedicated to Rimma Kiselitsa (In Memoriam)

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