A new audio commission by Flora Yin-Wong, made in collaboration with visual artist Go Watanabe, examining the recall of memory in our technological age. Using hundreds of accumulated iPhone recordings, the artist forges new connections between fractured memories, alternate worlds and intangible spaces.
Ubi Sunt is a new audio work by Flora Yin-Wong, commissioned by Somerset House Studios, composed of a tetralogy of sound pieces that abruptly jump between, cut up and stitch over six years of recordings captured in known and unknown locations - unlabelled and often lost sources. The connection between memory, emotion, and recorded moments that have accumulated on an iPhone is something that everyone could have their own version of. Hundreds of these snippets represent connections between the recall of memories, alternate worlds and spaces intangible, yet can be connected to across physical spaces.
In collaboration with artist Go Watanabe, the series will be accompanied by artwork that adopts the underlying themes via the camera work of the film. The scene slowly moves horizontally from left to right, which reminds of the viewer the movement of playing cassette tapes, or driving a car through a road. Household objects are placed as if they are constructing a town. The objects were developed submerged in natural light from a window, but for this piece, the shade remains on the surfaces in a new space of absolute darkness. The remaining shadows are the metaphor of memories that carried from the past, said to emerge as ghosts.
Varying from the sound of deep crunching snow in a forest in Hokkaido, Turkish EDM on the car radio, the rush of a reservoir in rural Wales, Buddhist monks chanting in Hangzhou, K-Pop in a teen clothing store in Seoul, and old vocal recordings - fragments that shift from the highly personal, nostalgic, to the extremely banal, or contrived and obnoxious are momentarily placed together.
