Mads Bering Christiansen and Jonas Jørgensen
Before life, there was sound. SONŌ (trans. latin: “[I make] sound”) interrogates a web of connections between sound, subjectivity, and artificial agency. A sessile soft entity, only capable of affecting its surroundings through expansive movement and sound generation, is ceaselessly sounding itself and various imagined environments using continuously generated audio. Its sound invokes auditory cultural conventions surrounding soft organic fictional beings and notions of a primordial affective kind of sound that operates beyond signification (Urlaut). The work highlights parallels between sound and organic life as two radically ecological and ephemeral phenomena.
Who are Mads Bering Christiansen and Jonas Jørgensen?
Mads Bering Christiansen is a Copenhagen-based designer/artist/researcher whose practice revolves around designing objects and experiences to speculate about the potential futures that may emerge from the human species’ technological entanglement and the way that we interact with and through technology. Mads is currently a PhD student at SDU Soft Robotics, University of Southern Denmark with a project that investigates the effects of integrating biomorphic aesthetics in robot designs for social human-robot interaction. He holds a BA in Digital Design from Aarhus University (2016), and a MSc in Digital Design and Communication from the IT University of Copenhagen (2018) with a specialization in digital aesthetics and art as research.
Jonas Jørgensen is an artist and researcher based in Copenhagen (DK) focusing on practice-based transdisciplinary work at the nexus of technical science, media art aesthetics, and the posthumanities. Jonas’ work addresses naturecultural issues related to embodiment, soft materiality, and human-robot interaction by conjoining technical and natural science approaches with material perspectives and performative epistemic practices. His work has been disseminated across academic and artistic contexts with exhibitions at institutions including MSU Museum for Contemporary Art (Zagreb), Ars Electronica Festival (Linz), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Science Gallery Dublin, and BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts (Brussels). He holds a PhD degree from the IT University of Copenhagen and is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark.