My two previous works were included in two new exhibitions. I had a solo show in Turku in a new media art gallery called Harmaa, where I showed my “Can You Hear the Grasshoppers Sing?” sound installation. Newspaper story in Finnish about the new gallery.

The second exhibition was a group exhibition called Imaginarium, which included students from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and alumni’s like myself. There I showed my installation “I’m Virtual”.

Soon I’ll have an exhibition with Hermanni Keko at Oksasenkatu11 gallery. The exhibition is called Pyhäinjäännös / Residue of Sacred and it is based on an earlier exhibition we did last year at Siipyy near Pori. Here is the exhibition text / picture / fb-event:

Joonas Siren & Hermanni Keko:

Pyhäinjäännös / Residue of Sacred

Go find a treasure at 60°10’29.7″N 25°00’56.7″E
dig a bone up
or mud inside plastic
golden organ
man is a relic
and that is
how things are
so
that is
things are
is
are
at
∞

Oksasenkatu11 Gallery 18.3-24.3

Opening Thu 17.3. at 6 PM

Open daily 12-6PM

Last day of the exhibition Thu 24.3.

https://www.facebook.com/events/944932425624988/

My soundwork “Can You Hear the Grasshoppers Sing?” is included in Jussi Koitela’s Skills of Economy Session – Beginning From the End event Saturday 20th of February in Kiasma theater.

This version is using the 7.0 soundsystem of the Kiasma theater, so it will be much more high fidelity version than the previous ones.

More info about the event here:
http://www.kiasma.fi/nayttelyt-ja-ohjelmisto/kiasma-teatteri/skills-of-economy-session/

I added documentation of Pyhäinjäännös/Residue of Sacred -exhibition with Hermanni Keko to my works page.

Also I’ll have soon my first Forces gig ever at the SIAM mini-festival, which incidentally I’m hosting with a friend.

Check the FB-event here
and if you want buy tickets here.

Next week I’ll have my first joint-exhibition with Hermanni Keko called Pyhäinjäännös (Relic in English, or more literally Residue of Sacred) in Siipyy, Kriistinankaupunki, 340 kilometres from Helsinki. The topic of the exhibition is the concept of a relic, but from a transhumanist perspective. It consist of videos, photographs, electronics, generative sound, objects and perhaps something else.

Here is the event if you you happen to be around Pori / Kristiinankaupunki early July.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1484632675161105/

Also, I started a new project with the same Hermanni called Zealous (https://soundcloud.com/zealousmusik). It is mainly beat based electronics, quite slow and sometimes distorted, but not without melodies.

Hey all,

I visited the experimental music program Sähkötyyny on Bassoradio last Sunday. I played a short HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA live set, played some records and talked about my music and artistic works. Sadly it is in Finnish but many of the tracks (and the live set I hope) is worth of a listen.

Hey all,

Not much news. I’m working on couple of different projects, but with no specific deadlines or exhibition schedules. One joint exhibition with a friend is coming up in July in the countryside of Finland, which we will hopefully exhibit later on in Helsinki. More info about that later.

I do have one older work (but first time in Finland) coming up at Free Art Space Sun 12th of April 12-20, which hopefully people will come to see. More info below:

Can You Hear the Grasshoppers Sing?

I remember one childhood summer, when I first realized that my father couldn’t hear the grasshoppers singing. I felt confused; why are there sounds that can not be heard by everybody?

This memory resurfaced a few years ago, when I was thinking more about my personal relation to sound.

To my knowledge the sound of singing grasshoppers is the only specific aural phenomenon that can be lost from hearing. Grasshoppers and crickets sing in a very high pitch between 12 – 20 kHz and these frequencies can be lost because of normal aging.

I find it poetic that there are sounds that are connected to the process of aging. The disappearance is somehow a reminder of our limited, transient existence.

“Can You Hear the Grasshoppers Sing?” is a generative 16-channel sound installation, where different field recordings of grasshopper sounds are randomly triggered to different speakers. The computer program also transposes these sounds; pitchshifting it up behind the 20 kHz human hearing threshold and down to 5 kHz enabling everybody to hear them.

The project was first exhibited as an end of residency exhibition in Avatar Centre Québec City, Canada in December 2013.

Sun 12.4.2015 12-20 in Free Art Space (Vapaan Taiteen Tila)

Free Art Space is located in Katri Valan Puisto -park’s shelter in the area of Sörnäinen, Helsinki. The entry is opposite of Vilhovuorenkuja 16.

Produced with the help of Avatar Centre.

Supported by Kone Foundation.

Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1420137154956320/

Hello,

Not so many news otherwise, but next month I will have a sound installation at Free Art Space here in Helsinki. Here is more info about it:

Sustained Magic

I have vivid memories of the trip to see Jurassic Park in the Autumn 1993.

Before the movie started, after the mandatory commercials and trailers, there was a sound.

I can’t remember if it was the first time I heard it, but I know I heard it then and many times afterwards.

The sound was magical.

A loud, glorious synthesizer drone, gliding from a low note to a high one, approaching almost physical.

It was accompanied by the bright, metallic and futuristic letters T H X.

I fell in love with that sound.

THX was a quality assurance system built by Lucas Arts corporation. During the 90s many film theaters in Helsinki adopted the standard, but during the 00s it lost its relevance and the sound was not heard anymore.

Sustained Magic is a sound installation based on a time stretched THX sound. The sound is stretched to two hours, an average length of a movie.

Sometimes going into movies was less about the movie itself than to be able to hear that sound again.

Sustained Magic is my own personal aural remembrance of that period of life.

-Joonas Siren

Sun 15.2.2015 12-20 Vapaan taiteen tila (Free Art Space)

Vapaan Taiteen Tila is located in Katri Valan Puisto -park’s shelter in the area of Sörnäinen, Helsinki. The entry is opposite of Vilhovuorenkuja 16.
https://www.facebook.com/events/1572266536318455/?notif_t=plan_user_joined

My scholarship/residency is coming to an end here in Braunschweig. Only the last two days left. Last week was the opening of our BS Projects 2013-2014 exhibition, where my Time Fractures (pictured above) piece was exhibited. I will do later on a better documentation to my works-page.

Other news, I got a studio grant from the Friends of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, which will cover a free studio in Suomenlinna for a year hosted by the Helsinki International Artist Programme (www.hiap.fi/). I am very grateful for this, because I haven’t had a proper studio since I graduated as a MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. I am really looking forward to returning back to Helsinki and start working at Suomenlinna. Let’s see what comes out of that!

Again in Braunschweig. Working, chilling etc.

I updated my works page with the recent work I’m Virtual, part of Foursome exhibition at Kutomo, Turku. Check it out: https://joonassiren.fi/virtual/

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Surrounded Islands

I started a new site “Land Art in Minecraft“, which is pretty self-explanatory. It will be an ongoing internet work. I’ll add new works to it, whenever there is time and I find suitable works to add.

http://landartinminecraft.tumblr.com/

An another month, an another residency.

This time it’s actually called a scholarship. I have been selected among two other sound artist (and five visual artists) to work here in Braunschweig six months by the Hochschüle fur Bildende Künste of Braunschweig. Luckily, the scholarships entails that I have to work minimium three months here, but I can also be half the time at home. So, I am traveling back and forth between Helsinki and Braunschweig the upcoming months.

I have been slowly regrouping my thoughts about what I am actually going to do here. I briefly googled Braunschweig before I came here and noticed that there is scientific facility called PTB here, which distributes time throughout Europe. This was fascinating news for me. I had never thought about the fact that the concepts of seconds, minutes and hours are in a sense completely artificial. There is no natural law that would dictate that the day should be divided to exactly 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds. In the PTB facility there is an atomic clock that gives us an scientific concept of a second. The PTB website explains:

“In the atomic clock the unit of time is realized in accordance with its definition. Caesium atoms are evaporated in a furnace. Each atom can be in one of the two states of lowest energy that caesium atoms can assume. After evaporation the atoms are magnetically sorted so that only atoms in one particular state reach the cavity resonator. There the atoms are irradiated by a magnetic microwave field and stimulated to change their state. After they have left the cavity resonator, the apparatus again sorts the atoms, this time collecting those that have changed their state in a special chamber. At a particular frequency of the microwave field, the maximum number is caught; this frequency is kept fixed and counted. After 9 192 631 770 periods one second has elapsed.”

At the moment, I am pretty sure my project will deal with this artificial concept of time in some way. Besides the atomic clock, I am also interested in metronomes. How music needs to fit inside a strict counter, a clock in a sense. The final work might be a project dealing with both concepts.

Hello,

Tomorrow starts the last week of my residency here in Quebec City, Canada. I am grateful that I was able work alongiside with the great people of Avatar co-op.

I managed to pull off one installation/exhibition, which you can read about here.

Four months is relatively long period for residency, so I am also pretty happy to return to Finland couple of days before Christmas.

Don’t really know what happens next year, but still looking forward for it. I try to keep my webpage updated!

Happy holidays!

Hello,

That is a picture of Montmorency Falls in Quebec City, Canada. As you can see, I am not currently in Helsinki. I am doing an artistic residency here in Quebec at La Center Méduse at Avatar Co-Op. Avatar is specialized for sound and electronic art and I am really happy to be here.

I have been here now two and half weeks. I have been mainly collecting field recording sounds, especially sounds of grashoppers for a installation idea that I have had a long time. The idea is to do a work about the subject of aging and the inevitalbe loss of hearing in the frequencies where the grasshoper sing. I took also my modular synthesizer with me, which I have been playing daily.

Not much to tell, otherwise. I’ll go to visit Montreal at some point, but otherwise this Fall will basically be me just quietly working here in my apartment/studio. I’ll post later some updates, when I’ll get some work finished.

Also, the works page is now updated to have all my exhibited work.

Hello, unfortunately I have been rather lazy this year with updating my site. The works pages are missing works from my solo exhibition “Ether Vortex – and other fantasies about infinity” and my graduation piece “Fall/Rapture” from the spring exhibition of Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. I try to update these during summer.

Second part of my master thesis for Finnish Academy of Fine Arts Fall/Rapture is now exhibited at the school’s spring exhibition Kuvan kevät. It’s open until 2.6.

Some information about my work from the catalog text I wrote:

—-

My MFA-degree show at the Gallery of Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Kasarminkatu 44) is reaching its end in two days.

The last day is Sunday 7th of April.

Here is some documentation:

Particle Collider (prototype)

-installation, 2013

Beyond Event Horizon

-Processing coding/video installation

I’ll have my first solo show in two weeks at the gallery of Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (Kasarminkatu 44). The opening is at 21.3. 18-20 and after that the exhibition is open from 22.3. to 7.4. every day 11-18. At the opening there will be music performances by Cleavage (Tuukka Salonen & Joonas Siren) and Tulasi (Veli-Matti Ikävalko & J.Koho).

The exhibition will be consisting of three installations, one purely sound, one sound/object and one video/sound.

Thematically the exhibition revolves around the concept of invisibility and/or ephemerality.

In the Fall of 2012 I was very productive with my new modular synthesizer, so the SoundCloud account of Younghusband has filled with many different tracks. Here are bunch of them:

Bit of a late update, but late last November 2012 I’ll played with Jonas Olesen live on our radio program Aavemaa.

I played my modular synth while Jonas played with different kind of electromagnetic pickups, pocket computer and other devices.

You can listen the result here:
http://aavemaa.tumblr.com/post/36521201444/16th-aavemaa-show-jonas-olesen-joonas-siren