Aura Satz
Friday, 7 June 2013
Work from her oeuvre.
“The work of Aura Satz encompasses film, sound, performance and sculpture. In recent years she has made a collection of films that look closely at sound visualisation through various technologies and acoustic devices such as the Chladni plate, the Ruben’s tube, the theremin, mechanical music, phonograph grooves and drawn/optical sound.
Her films engage with the materiality of these technologies and the resulting sound patterns – codes in the act of formation – and how these destabilise paradigms of writing and readership. The camerawork tends to pore over its subject, zooming in visually and acoustically until it becomes abstracted in scale and context and reconfigured to evoke a new anatomy or landscape of sorts, an architectural structure, or a writing system. The film narratives often explore the more metaphorical, literary and cinematic associations, whilst the visuals provide an intimate encounter with archaic and obsolete sound technologies, exploring their de-familiarized sculptural and tactile qualities, and revealing new ways of thinking about sound. She is particularly interested in technologies, which are on the cusp of invention or obsolescence, at the point in time when their purpose, their ergonomic relationship to bodies, and the ways in which they might be modelled on physical or psychic human functions are at their most unstable.” –Paradise Row