FLOATING SOUND GALLERY

Vienna

Victoria Morgunova

Victoria Morgunova — media artist, musician.
Born in 1995 in Tver, where she graduated with honours from the school of art at the Tver College of culture named after N. A. Lvov. In 2012 she moved to Saint Petersburg, where she attended Pavlov First State Medical University of St. Petersburg. Since 2015 she studies and researches psychology at Saint Petersburg State University. Since 2016 she studies painting under the guidance of A. S. Zaslavsky, participates in exhibitions of contemporary art in St. Petersburg, and since 2017 engaged in electronic experimental music.
Areas of activity and interests: sound art, sound poetry, radio art, experimental electronic music, multichannel installations.
Victoria’s works are closely related to the poetization and verbalisation of sound, the semantics of sound and radio poetry at the junction with modern radical electronic music.

'the./border.'/1.2', 2021 (12’30“)

'the./border.'/1.2' is one of the compositions of the multichannel spatial sound installation /'metronome.of.time./ that was created within the framework of 'The Border Laboratory' program of the festival Access Point VII for the site-specific sketch 'Endless Work'. The compositions were named according to the spatial location of 10 bluetooth speakers in the building where performance took place, most of the speakers played several compositions, which is indicated in the title ['1]/['2], etc./. Part of the sound space of the installation consisted of sounds recorded during the laboratory: walking through abandoned buildings, electric current, birds singing in the Ivangorod fortress, etc.

C.R.N.S.24’50” (excerpt, full version 40’55″) / 2020

The quadraphonic installation “C.R.N.S.” [Communication by Radio Number Stations] is the result of working with recordings of numbered radio stations (the range of radio waves with a frequency of 3 MHz to 30 MHz), which includes the processing of the recorded signal in real time.
Numbers stations are shortwave radio stations created and used by various special services to transmit data to spies, reconnaissance and other military agents in foreign countries. They broadcast encrypted messages in the form of groups of numbers or letters using computer-synthesized voice, voice of narrator, Morse code, or digital mode. While the encryption methods used by most numbers stations are unknown, many believe that in most cases a one-time code is used: mathematical addition of a set of random numbers (key) to plaintext, which can be used only once and should be destroyed after use.
In a broad sense, the project is dedicated to the topic of communication. In this case, communication is considered not as a dialogic interpersonal, but as a unidirectional process. Instead of subject-subject relations, subject-object relations appear, where the other side turns into a passive object of influence.
In accordance with the Linear (classical) communication model of G. Lasswell (1948) and the Noise communication model of C. Shannon – W. Weaver (1949), this project can be characterized as a representation in musical of a linear and unidirectional communication process in which feedback is absent and not considered.
According to J. Derrida, communication cannot be completely pure and successful, without distorting the perception of truth, nor can there be truth without lies and error. But in this case, we have a signal that can be decoded in the only possible way (i.e. there is no possibility of distorting the semantic aspect of signal perception). At the same time, we cannot claim to reveal the meaning of the message.
Thus, the project proposes to be in the space of unambiguous signals from various numbered radio stations (active and already discontinued), raising the question of the ambiguity of interpretation, perception and understanding of the communication process as such. It also gives everyone the opportunity to become the “unknown” (that is, perceiving) in this “equation” of communication and to carry out their own decoding of messages.