You are variations

‘You are variations’ is conceived as a set of mobile sound installations, live concerts, and events, which allow comparison between ecophysiological processes driven by different and changing environmental conditions, and is accompanied by a series of books providing the background information of this project and documenting its working process.

The project experiments with the interpretation and transposition potential of meteorological and physiological long-term monitoring data into sonic soundscapes, in a first version concentrating on a one-year water cycle through Pine trees in Swiss dry alpine and wet midland ecosystems.

According to the contemporary environmental situation the project takes place against a background of serious concern regarding the trends in climatic change, and correspondingly deals with issues of overall temperature increase, and related water cycle modifications: changes that unfold in most diverse and yet unknown manners, but that certainly do take place, unavoidably, globally, as well as in each local microclimate.

Environmental data sets describing soil moisture-, sapflow-, leaf gas exchange and meteorological conditions from two contrasting long-term monitoring sites are transposed into two soundscape, rendering the differences in water availability and plant response of pine trees growing at the respective regions sonically comparable: one long-term monitoring site at the xeric forest plot Visp, Valais, with a continental climate typical of the central alps getting remarkably dryer in the monitored years, and one from the moist site Vordemwald on the Swiss Plateau.

‘You are variations’ is affected and inspired by these trees. The connection lays in a shared generative impulse. Its resonations can be seen as attempts to convert distance into intensity, focusing on a qualitative transformation of distance into immediacy of relation to tree and self. Getting inside the sounds bears the potential to lead you inside these trees, not for to represent, reflect, or mirror the physical event, but for to become the actual embodiment of the event.

‘You are variations’ is a research project in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL.

Amsterdam, January 2012
Christina Della Giustina