Feature: The Big Picture - Exhibition - Aura Satz: Sound Seam at Wellcome Collection until January 16.

Published: 16 December, 2010

HAUNTING sounds, uncanny echoes and the acoustic inscriptions of bodies will be encountered with the presentation of Sound Seam, a new film by artist Aura Satz at Wellcome Collection. 

Funded by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, Sound Seam explores the anatomy of hearing and the material qualities of sound and memory.  

Drawing on Rainer Maria Rilkes’ text Primal Sound (1919), which considers “playing” the coronal suture of a human skull with a phonograph needle, Satz explores the body’s surfaces as potential repositories of unheard sounds. 

Capturing these hidden voices, Sound Seam turns to early recording technologies, with the grooves of records finding a corporeal mirror in the lines of the body.

Research and inspiration for the film resulted from a residency at UCL’s Ear Institute, where Satz was based throughout 2009-10. Viewers are drawn through the mouths of gramophone horns into a hypnotic sequence of imagery taken from auditory anatomy and sound recording technology, with the groove-like forms of highly magnified stereocilia and cochlea played against microscopic close-ups of gramophone grooves.   

The soundtrack is a dense narrative comprising two voices, pre-empting, echoing and overlapping one another, as they reveal a forensic love story.  

Music, composed by Aleks Kolkowski, derives from a gramophone needle tracing the meandering furrow line where a skull is joined, and the otoacoustic emissions produced by the ear.  

More than 100 of these recordings have been written and overwritten onto wax cylinder or records to create unexpected scratches, glitches, loops and faint echoes.

Aura Satz says: “Sound Seam gives voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. 

“The soundtrack’s musical composition is interlaced with layers of voice-overs narrating a tale of mourning. The film uses microscopic photography, scanning electron microscopy, and sounds of otoacoustic emissions to uncover haunting aural bonescapes.“

Lucy Shanahan, curator at Wellcome Collection, adds: “Aura Satz has given us a haunting and cross-sensory love story, which explores inscriptions on the body, sonic immortalisation, and our modes of remembering, mourning, listening and forgetting. 

“Appropriately for Wellcome Collection, Sound Seam gives us an entirely new vision of our own materiality.” 

• Aura Satz: Sound Seam runs as a single screen projection in the Forum at Wellcome Collection until January 16.