Minusoid on Sinusoid 2016
Location: Tartu Town Hall Square in front of Kaarsilla Bridge / Urban Festival UIT 1026
Authors: Merilin Kaup, Mariann Tihane, Annika Kangur, Liina Soosaar, Madis Vahtramäe
Estonian Association of Architects Awards SMALL for small objects nominee 2018
"Perhaps that's what i feel, an outside and and inside and me in the middle. Perhaps that's what I am, I am the thing which divides the world in two, on the one side the outside, on the other side the inside, that can be as this as foil, I'm neither on side nor the other I'm i the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I am the tympanum."
Samuel Beckett " The Unnamable"
The urban festival UIT was looking for installations that would correspond to the main theme of the festival "An Encounter with a Stranger". We were interested in strangeness as a feeling or phenomenon and we mainly focused on the creation of an atmosphere rather than a meeting place. Just like recognition, also strangeness occurs at the moment of noticing. Recognition usually marks the end of increased attention. The longer somethings remains strange, the longer it keeps alert. The installation "Minusoid on Sinusoid" attempted to provide an extended threshold between the known and the unknown - highlighting and maintaining strangeness in a familiar place.
The installation manifested itself to the city as the black box with vibrating walls - a black mesh fabric stretched on a wooden frame creating the moiré effect and vibrated in the rhythm of he bass sound by recording, manipulating and playing back the surrounding soundscape.
There were ramps on two sides leading to the centre through narrow tunnel-like space where an encounter with another person often occurred through a random touch. It came to combine qualities that are exotic to an urban environment - tactility, softness, elasticity and vulnerability.
The open microphones connected with the black box were located nearby in public and also more sheltered places, for instance, bu the steps leading down to the bridge and on the promenade along the river. The opportunity to rebel against the social code was not left unused. The situation where loud bigoted political tirade or teenage boy's zesty self-expression distorted by sound effects can be heard from a black box in the city centre is odd and attracts attention. At the time it seemed indeed that the sense of strangeness also included and intense sense of presence.
Later we bought heaps pf literature from the city library to tame our young friends. The self-same local boys would spend hours reciting poems and short stories into the microphone. Thus, it was sequence of the random various events - one night, for instance, there were turntables in front of the pavilion with the local DJs occupying the space. The black box literally became a giant speaker living up to its physical appearance.
We were inspired by the interest to test the boundary surfaces between design, sound, literature and architecture. the entire audio journey was recorded on a cassette that was later played at the Genialistide club as a part of completely different installation...
(MAJA Estonian Architectural Review Summer/Autumn 2018/94. Text by Merilin Kaup, Mariann Tihane, Liina Soosaar)
“Rundum Showcase #10 is a spatial-temporal interpretation of Paljassaare peninsula in Estonia that summarizes fragments of memory, which have accumulated there during the last nearly 16 years. However, the main objective of the project is to offer an opportunity to come and make acquaintance with the area and, if desired, to share the experience with others. Space is not just an environment that describes or explains the physical parameters but is also each person’s personal interpretation of it.
Space does not only entail the the physical parameters of various environments, but also the subjective interpretations of individual people. The ways in which we perceive space are different, as are the emotions invoked. Space, as a whole, is formed by an infinite number of personal meanings and interpretations subjugated to a temporal axis. Everyone of us has a story to tell, a memory of this room. It is/was personal, it is/was revealing, it is/was Paljassaare (The Naked Island).
RUNDUM Showcase is an exhibition space in a display-case style of a box. It’s mobile and flexible both in terms of location and the participating artists. Showcase’s programme is like a chain reaction in which five people pass the Showcase forward from one to another. The first artist to present his/her work is invited by Rundum. Beyond that, each of the artists is asked to find the next presenting artist themselves, until there has been a total of five people, and it is again Rundum’s turn to decide on the next artist to start a new creative cycle. an eas font, with tall and
