Folldal Åpen Form Paviljong av Luft / Folldal Open Form Pavilion of Air

This audiowork for Folldal is part of the pan-European Open Form Pavilion of Air series, following Pavilions for Warsztaty Kultury (Lublin, PL), Meetfactory (Prague, CZ) and Sirius Arts Centre (Cobh, IE) - each offer a modulation of a location and its context. The series and its name draws on Oskar & Zofia Hansen’s “Open Form” architecture and their architectural concept to signify service areas within their design of Lublin’s LSM housing complex with a parabola-shaped roof. The Open Form Pavilion of Air uses sound and site-mapping to offer a playful renewal and reframing of public space as an essential engagement for the community.‘

The audiowork’s elements are mapped onto zones such that visitors’ navigations of the site compose a unique piece in real-time using the free Echoes app. The Pavilion’s logo shows these overlapping zones that form the Pavilion, its logos. Geolocation identifies visitors’ place on-site, movements across zones trigger associated audio elements and combine to create an interactive composition - the roof of sound - streamed via their mobile connection to their headphones. The Pavilion without walls is delineated by this audio roof, which is heard to extend across the site. This isn’t a solid roof but a porous airborne concept, one that retains a stark physicality, letting in the weather and surrounding sound but also changing them while subtly reframing visitors' experience of the location's audiosphere.

The elements forming the Pavilion use mathematical principles, such as those underlying the phase-shifting of beating frequencies and also the hyperbolic paraboloid. Their rising or falling shape can be heard as lines of rising or falling tones in various zones of the Pavilion that intersect and change one another.

The Pavilion's framing of shifts in the sound within the location over time also produce changes, modulations, for each point and each navigation over time – revealing subtlety where before was boundaries. Thus the site’s ephemeralisation – in this case its virtual materials brought into a real causal relationship with the physical world, their circularity materialised from our ‘always online’ existence – becomes grounded via a concrete ontological examination of the site itself. The simplicity and physicality of the invisible roof – the Pavilion’s audio – interacts directly with the physical site, drawing the non-physical into the physical realm: effectively rendering the site’s sound, the location's context more concrete.