Artist Statement

Sven Anderson’s work explores the act of listening within diverse architectural, physical, social, and emotional contexts. His installations and performances are parasitical, feeding off of details of the immediate built environment, the bodies of the audience, and fragments of local history and ecology to suggest emergent, site-specific forms.

Anderson is working towards a PhD at Trinity College Dublin that situates the practice of sound installation in public space within the larger fields of architecture and urban design, and has recently completed a large-scale responsive sound and video installation sited at Connolly Station in Dublin in collaboration with artist Ciara O’Malley and the Railway Procurement Agency (www.svenanderson.net/streets/).

Anderson serves on the editorial board of Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture, a new peer-reviewed journal focused on sound studies. The journal's first issue, An Ear Alone is Not a Being: Embodied Mediations in Audio Culture us currently available online, with the second and third issues (A Sonic Geography: Rethinking Auditory Spatial Practice and Noise, Please) due to be published in 2012.

Anderson's other recent work includes sound design for Aoife Desmond and Seoidín O’Sullivan's project Trespass, a series of improvised performances with Russell Hart (economicthoughtprojects), an untitled sound installation in the exhibition Apply Within: Experience Essential curated by Jennie Guy, and a series of workshops with a community group at the NCBI (National Council for the Blind, Ireland) in collaboration with Siobhán Clancy culminating in a soundwalk and community artwork. He is currently developing a series of multi-sensory (aural / visual / haptic) works that investigate the effects of low-frequency vibration present in urban housing units on the sexual experience of those residing within these structures.

Anderson has been based between Ireland and the US since 2002, and his work has been installed and performed in Ireland, England, Germany, and the US.

The photograph above shows a detail of the installation Streets: Past Present and Future at Connolly Station in Dublin. Two speakers mounted on the canopy support column play back a composition based on locational sounds recorded and transformed in real-time within the station.