Paula Vītola is an interdisciplinary artist based in Liepaja, Latvia. Trained in the fields of media and visual arts, her artistic interests have shifted mostly towards sound art. In her artistic practice, she is experimenting with natural and physical phenomena such as light, radio, and electricity. The artist is creating prototypes, artworks, and performances exploring signals and invisible energies, their materiality and relationships, as well as phenomena of human perception. It’s the belief of the artist that media and multi-sensory art can make one’s life longer by triggering their curiosity and awareness.
You were trained in the fields of media and visual arts. How did progress toward sound occur?
I studied visual art while in school and later started New Media Art studies at Liepaja University. I was always interested in sound, but I thought the tools for sound synthesis were too abstract for me. It did not feel natural for me to press buttons, rotate knobs or look at screens to create something that has no visual representation or is presented through software as something else such as code, blocks, waveforms etc. Also, I was not educated in playing any musical instruments, and as a child, I was told that I was not musical in general – apparently, I had no sense of hearing tones and repeating them correctly with my voice.
My earlier years of artistic practice were mostly interactive installations and artworks, prototyping imaginary devices, as well as artistic research often driven by aesthetic curiosity. I was and still am very interested in the inner workings of technological devices and the sociopolitical implications of communication technology and its supporting infrastructure. Additionally, I was always interested in nature and natural sciences, physics, and mathematics, mostly.
A lot of my approach to work could be described as media archaeological, as I often work with technology that was not created in the most recent years. In the past, the devices were simpler and more physical; when opened, the parts were visible, and it was possible to somewhat understand how they worked by looking at them, fixing or improving them was a common practice. The interfaces were actual physical things instead of digital representations, symbols, so the technological experience was more tactile. And one could actually notice with their senses how the technology uses electricity and radio waves – it was all connected. It still is, but back then, it was possible to feel it more. The weather made the TV not work properly, the phone landlines allowed people to hear nearby electrical fields, and one could change radio channels accidentally by moving around in a room or touching antennas.
Through that, I started to somewhat understand how each technological device moves and transforms energy from one form to another, and that is all they do. I enjoyed manipulating those energies while playing around with antennas when I was making simple analog TV transmitters, and noticed how the properties of the signal change the image and the sound.
The biggest personal discovery for this progression to mostly sound art came to me a bit later when I found out about Alexander Graham Bell’s photophone – a telephone which used sunlight to transmit sound, the first wireless communication device, even before the radio. The concept of making something so innovative and yet fully dependent on environmental conditions was fascinating to me, so I wanted to experiment with that. I tried to repeat Bell’s technique for transmitting sound using sunlight, mirrors, and photoelectric materials, and built a device that records speech on paper with sunlight. The principle of physically moving light to create sounds was something I wanted to go much deeper into, as I felt like there was still a lot to discover, so I started doing that. I would conclude that the progress to sound in my artistic practice could be described as slowly moving away from making speculative and critical interfaces and systems to manipulating energies aesthetically and directly.
In your artistic practice, you experiment with natural and physical phenomena such as light, radio, and electricity. What would you say is the interplay of light/visuals and sound in your work?
The interplay of sound and light is very direct, so the actual answer to this question would be very technical. For my performances, I use my instruments, a system that generates sound from lights. I use solar panels as sensors to transform the energy from lights to electrical energy and the energy generated in the solar panels is fluctuating in accordance to the rapidly flickering lights; the fluctuating energy functions as a sound signal when sent to a speaker; the frequency of the sound is the same as the frequency of the light.
I have been experimenting with this technique for around eight years already, and I have built many instruments that emit oscillating, flickering lights instead of generating sound directly. Also, I use some readily available lights, such as Christmas lights that have built-in rhythms and tones or a photography LED lamp with changeable brightness and temperature, which creates fine and interesting electrical noise. Each light has a specific sound quality, and I want to emphasise that through playing them.
The sound is generated in the visual output of the light instruments – each light is emitting photons that I catch with the solar panels, holding them in my hands or moving stands that they are attached to. With this process, I sculpt the sounds in space with my movements.
A more detailed description about the workings of my instrument, the photoacoustic and stroboscopic effects, and the research behind it can be read in this article I wrote for the Speculative Sound Symposium last autumn. Even though it is not easy to describe in writing, at least in a way that would be understandable for the audience and me, as I am not a physicist and I am not even totally sure that I use the right terms for everything, the process is very intuitive. When I give workshops, allowing people to play around with my instruments, they usually get how they work without much explaining.
While performing, I have to use my whole body and multiple senses, I have to be aware of the space and the brightness of lights, and how each light might sound in combination with the other. The more I look at the lights and their barely noticeable slight changes, the more I become aware and sensitive to them. I enjoy experiencing physical phenomena directly like that, it can be a very hypnotic experience that also allows the audience and me to feel the limits and thresholds of human perception. It also demonstrates the connection and similarities of the behaviour of the light waves (photons) and physical (sound) waves
You also develop prototypes – instruments and tools that you use in your work. Can you talk about developing these prototypes and which one is your favourite?
During the past years, I have built a bunch of instruments and prototypes not just for generating sound with lights, but I also sometimes make antennas for listening to electromagnetic fields, experiment with contact microphones, and other simple ways to manipulate and transform energies.
My favourite prototype would be the one I am working on right now, again after a very long time. In 2018, during a residency in Maajaam, Estonia, while I was still very new to experimenting with photoacoustics, I was walking around the area with a recorder in my hand and a solar panel plugged in trying to find sounds that can be heard this way to understand how this light-to-sound transformation really works. I noticed that sometimes I hear some insect-like sounds, and I realised that they probably are exactly that – insects flying around and projecting their shadow onto the solar panel, as we know that insects make their sounds by moving their wings. After that, I caught some flies and mosquitoes in jars to test this, and it worked exactly like that. I could hear the insects clearly just because of their shadow – I was amazed by that, it felt almost magical. It was also how I discovered for myself the principle for future instrument making. My first instruments were motors with improvised propeller wings made from tape, which I called “insect simulators”. I also hoped to experiment with mosquito sounds in the future.
This year, in collaboration with Latvian art collective Orbīt, we are building a system for recording flying insects outdoors in the evenings. We will set up lights that will work both as a lure and a tool for recording them. We describe it as isolated recordings – photoacoustics is a technique that allows recording only insects that are flying into an isolated range created by light, not the environment around them.
You are based in Latvia. Can you talk about the Latvian experimental/sound/visual arts scene? Which activities and initiatives are worth checking out? Are you active on the local scene?
I am based in Liepāja, which is quite a small town, and it is different from the scene in Riga. I was lucky to study New Media Art in Liepaja University Art Research Lab around 2010, which was a unique place at the time, gathering a lot of young and forward-thinking creative individuals. It was very modern, technological, and internationally focused, offering an alternative approach to higher art education. There was not much else happening in Liepaja, so we created our own small scene, organising events and forming artist collectives. A lot of us are active in the arts now, and some of us still work together. I used to be really active in organising events, I still am, but less so. One of the events that is worth checking out is the Sound Days festival, which we started around 2013 as a part of our study process, an exam for the sound module, where the students presented their work. From that time, we started organising it every spring as a regular event. It is around one week long with a diverse international programme including workshops, concerts, seminars, exhibitions, and other activities. This year, our theme was algorithms in sound art, and we hosted the first Baltic Live Coders Meetup and the first Baltic algorave.
I think that, in general, the arts scene in Latvia is very interesting, based on various initiatives all over the country, but mostly centered in Riga. I am thankful to the RIXC The Center For New Media Culture for existing for so many years already, bringing here and producing some truly experimental, border-crossing media art.
I am very happy for a lot of newer initiatives that I am also collaborating with such as Laidi Palace Residency – an old manor that is being revived by artists and local municipality as a residency and art space, Kefirsstudio – a young artist initiative for interdisciplinary art with whom I will host a workshop this summer in plain-air, and also Strenči Sonification Station which is a project/residency on the opposite side of the country from Liepaja dedicated to exploring natural environment in various ways with a focus on sound art – we will make the mosquito recorder there
What role does art have in your life and the lives of people in general?
I used to pay more attention to the critical thinking aspect of art, the thought and logic instead of senses, but at some point I realised that all information is obtained through senses and a lot of knowledge is gained unconsciously. Art is something that makes me pay attention to things more; it heightens and trains the senses. I think that is something that art does to anyone if they are still open and curious enough.
The more I make art, the more I have started paying close attention to things around me, my environment, and its changes. I spend a lot of time listening and watching, mostly for the experience, inherently for the inspiration as well. Seemingly ordinary things such as the sea and the moon become interesting when I start paying closer attention. I start noticing the details like the trajectories and timings of the moon, or how diverse the sound of the sea can be depending on the weather conditions and the listener’s position.
We are all born with a sense of curiosity and wonder – it is necessary for our survival. But in a civilised world, we have built systems for living almost automatically, acting as parts of those systems. Experiencing and creating art can get a person out of that automatic state of mind and reawaken that sense.
Interview Lucia Udvardyova
Photo Kristaps Anškens