A I O N
Audiovisual installation. DVD. Duration 50 minutes. © 2006.
This work aims to unfold four abandoned spaces inside the Zone of Exclusion
in Chernobyl, Ukraine. It deals with a sonic and visual experience of
time, absence, and change - in an area haunted by an invisible and inaudible
danger, amidst the slowly decaying remains of human civilization.
The sound of each room was evoked by an elaborate method: in each room,
Kirkegaard made a recording 10 minutes and then played the recording back
into the room, recording it again. This process was repeated up to ten
times. As the layers got denser, each room slowly began to unfold a drone
with various overtones.
For the visual representation, two of the four rooms employ a recording
technique parallel to the sonic layering. A video camera was placed on
one particular spot in the space and it recorded non-stop from there.
This recording was then projected and recorded with another camera tine
and time again. In this process, some of the rooms turned darker, others
turned brighter – they reveal themselves on the screen, they dissolve
into white light or they disappear into darkness. For the two other rooms
video feedback was used to under- and overexpose the image.
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A I O N Jacob Kirkegaard’s AION is a sonic and visual installation that considers time, absence, and change inside the Zone of Exclusion in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Made almost twenty years after of the world’s worst nuclear power accident and amidst its decaying remains, AION captures the sound and sight of an area haunted by a seemingly invisible and inaudible danger. S I L E N C E u n f o l d i n g i n s p a c e For AION Kirkegaard made 10-minute recordings in four abandoned spaces, a swimming pool, a small concert hall, a gymnasium and a church, and then re-recorded the playback inside each room in which it was recorded. As he repeated this process up to ten times, sound layers increased in density and in each room a drone with various overtones slowly unfolded. Kirkegaard's "sonic time layering" refers back to Alvin Lucier's work "I am sitting in a room" [1970] in which Lucier recorded his voice and repeatedly played the recording back in the space in which it was recorded. In AION, Kirkegaard himself abandoned these already abandoned spaces and waited for whatever evolved from the silence. For the visual representation, Kirkegaard employed two basic techniques, one paralleled the recording technique by first filming the rooms and playing the image back and re-recorded multiple times. This was used for two of the four rooms, the church and the concert hall. For the other two rooms video feedback was used to under- and overexpose the image. In each case a different effect resulted from the change of exposure over time. C H E R N O B Y L 2 0 y e a r s The rooms he found and recorded were abandoned abruptly, urgently, and for good: Their inhabitants were evacuated by Soviet military and had to leave all their belongings behind. On April 26th, 1986, the explosion of reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had effaced all possibilities of human survival in the vicinity. Twenty decades after the event, Kirkegaard explores the phenomenon of radiation with the medium of sound. By recording, mirroring and layering the silence of four radiating spaces he aims to unlock a fragment of the time existing inside the zone. This work was created by Jacob Kirkegaard. All sound and video was recorded in Chernobyl in October 2005.
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