Jana Winderen

Jana Winderen is an artist educated in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London, and she has a background in mathematics, chemistry and fish ecology from the University in Oslo.

Jana Winderen is the recipient of major international commissions and residencies, releases her audio works on Touch and In 2011 she won the Golden Nica, Ars Electronica, for Digital Musics & Sound Art.

Winderen is concerned with finding and revealing sounds from hidden sources, both inaudible to the human senses and sounds from places and creatures difficult to access.

Travelling to remote corners of the earth to make her field recordings, Winderen uses hydrophones (sensitive underwater microphones) to research hidden depths and collect sounds that reveal the complexity and strangeness of the unseen world beneath.

She has collected these invisible but audible recordings from rivers, shores and the ocean in Asia, Europe and America, from glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Norway and used them as source material for composition in live environments, installations, film, dance, radio, CD, cassette and vinyl productions.

Her compositions develop through a constant process of refinement, slowly collaging sounds together in a process akin to sculpting.

To create Ultrafield, Winderen worked with sounds in the ultrasound range, which humans can’t hear but many mammal and insect species communicate with. She altered the pitch of these transmissions to the human range, allowing us to experience sonic realities that are otherwise out of reach.

Winderen recently performed at home in Oslo at the experimental festival Only Connect. In a church, in the center of the pews, her set was made up mostly of aquatic field-recordings from her installation Dive: sloshing waves, whales that seemed to be yelling and laughing at themselves, shrimp that click their claws in tones that turn frantic and loud.