Fish Factory

David Unland is an audiovisual tinkerer, who came to Stöðvarfjörður from Bremen, Germany, to stay for the month of October 2021. He used his time in the creative center to write the code for a computer program that transforms the contours of mountain ridges into sound. The work focuses on rigid mountain and rock features, and how perspective strongly defines their shape.

Artist Statement:

”What appears to be sturdy, immobile constructs of nature becomes vivid and fluent, once you start changing your perspective. Moving only a dozen of meters, the compositions of all the lines describing the mountains’ characters will shift ‒ the outline of the ridges in front of the clear skies, the tilted lava layers inclined towards the north-west, the trails that falling gravel leaves behind or the gashes that are carved into the slopes by the rivers ‒ they all are moving, as you change your perspective.”

Observations were made during hikes in the mountains around the fjord, taking a series of photos of the same mountain peaks from slightly different perspectives. This way, a visually appealing collection of mountain-sound-files was created that can be found on the project’s website: http://david.unland.eu/mountainScanner/

The code is open source and can be found on GitHub: github.com/dunland/of_mountainScanner

”As a side project, I worked on a remake of a musical piece I wrote & recorded earlier, in 2013-14, in Iceland. I tried to use all the instruments and facilities I could find in the Fish Factory, including a lovely/shabby acoustic guitar with five bronze and one nylon string, a bass guitar, a drumset, percussion, piano, an old harmonium, an organ beat machine, and vocals. The song was recorded solely with a Zoom H4N field recorder.”

The music can be found here: https://animal-dreams.bandcamp.com/album/high-lights-over-st-varfj-r-ur

Thank you, David! :)

// Check the interview on Youtube //