Svend Sømod
Resonance & Harmony
As an artist, Svend Sømod works with mathematics. Mathematical formulae and figures have traditionally been used as supporting compositional principles in architecture, music and visual art. For his exhibition Resonance & Harmony Svend Sømod has used mathematical principles to generate three new installations.
»…it’s actually touching to feel the fragility of the blue laser light and its rotating, retro-digital spiral patterns.«
Kunsten.nu
This exhibition contains flashing lights
The central work consists of a kind of instrument that is built up of 16 steel tubes, each of which has been installed with its own cone of light in a symmetrical colonnade. Speakers have been placed in the tubes that play sinus tones in tune with the length of the tube and representing specific resonating frequencies. Sound and light change in intensity and colour in accordance with the development of an algorithm that is based on a variable’s division into sequential odd integers (I, III, IIIII, IIIIIII, etc.). The result is an almost chant-like sound-and-light composition.
The mood is already set in the initial sound, light and heat installation, which is harmonised with the resonating sounds of the central installation. The mathematics underlying the concluding work of the exhibition overlaps and makes it a part of the symbiotic totality of the central installation. It is a so-called laser spirograph that draws geometrical ’flowers’ in varying degrees of complexity on the end wall of the exhibition space.
Svend Sømod (b. 1992) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2021. He lives and works in Copenhagen. His praxis covers various disciplines as an extension of the Gesamtkunstwerk tradition of the 1800s, which involves linking several art forms in a total work of art, as in the case of the composer Richard Wagner. He advocated combining music, theatre and visual art to achieve the right ambience in his operatic works. The total work of art, which spans several sensory dimensions, is also the basis of Sømod’s work, which, besides sound-and-light installations, also involves formats as different as sculpture, painting, graphics, decoration, furniture, lamps, a drinks bar, and even a cocktail printer.
