Anna Hill

Auroral Synapse

This publication has been made possible with the

generous support of the Irish Arts Council

Published by Space Synapse Ltd November 2003

Auroral Synapse The photographs in this volume were first shown as part
of an interactive film and photographic sound installation at
Grennam Mill, Thomastown during the Kilkenny Arts Festival
in August 2003.

The premier showing used two spatialized sound fields;

one accompanying the Hassleblad photographs seen here,
sharing the Earth bound experience of my journey and
the other, accompanying the Celestial encounter with the
auroras, as I experienced under an Arctic sky. I am grateful
to have collaborated with the talented Iarla O’Lionaird on
the sound composition as well as the highly creative and
generous Lappish Finns who I met along my journey.

Through Auroral Synapse, I seek to re-address the inter-

connectedness of life, death and celestial events through
sensory perception, interaction and emotion.

Anna Hill
October 2004 This book is dedicated with love to my brother John Hill,
my sister Kate Hill and my mother Claire Hill who keep
me searching.
A journey to light Anna Hill set out on an expedition to Finnish Lapland in
March 2003 in order to photograph, film and record the
phenomena of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, and
to explore various subjective, indigenous, and scientific
responses to this great natural display. This was an archetypal
northern journey - towards insight, towards light in darkness
- with isolation, clarity and cold along the way. The tangible
bounties of this journey include the fine photographs
presented in this volume, as well as a BAFTA-nominated
interactive installation first exhibited at the Kilkenny Arts
By Robert Monroe Festival in the summer of 2003.
Both these photographs and the installation sustain
significant paradoxes. Technology and art, nature and culture,
the local and the cosmic are all contained within images that
transmit not only clarity and coolness, but also warmth and
delight. The vast power of the northern lights is met by an
imagination at once deft, delicate and playful.
The northern lights occur when ions streaming from the
sun, in what is called “the solar wind,” are drawn down by
the earth’s magnetic field and collide with ionospheric gases,
causing the particles to glow. Hill’s work not only registers
these powerful micropartical collisions, but is itself a luminous
product of meetings between different elements.
With admirable subtlety, Auroral Synapse weaves a diverse
set of artistic, scientific and observational perspectives into
a unified whole. The installation soundscape combines the
music of Iarla O’Lionaird, which is inspired by the Sean-nós
tradition, with low frequency radio wave recordings from the
Sodankyla Observatory. At this observatory Hill worked with
Esa Turunen, a geophysicist who has argued for the audibility
of the aurora borealis, a phenomenon which in the Sami
language is called “audible light.” In the installation, as well,
the breathing of audience members, transmitted by contact
microphones, interacts with images of the aurora as they are
projected onto a curve of suspended fabric. The brightness
and proximity of the projected images varies according
to the patterns of breathing. This aspect of audience
participation brings together both a space bioengineering
breath sensor, and folkloric accounts of indigenous people
singing and whistling to the auroras to bring them closer. The
exhibit thus reunites human scale with celestial scope, sound
with light, and science with folklore.
Not so much a recreation as a simulacrum, the installation
produces an environment in which the audience is invited to
participate in several sensory experiences at once. Included
are images of the aurora borealis moving above the forested
horizons as projected on the wall and curvilinear veil,
the human and natural sounds animating the space, and
kinesthetic patterns created by the movement of viewers
through the veiled space. One of nature’s great multimedia
shows - the northern lights - is referenced through the
economical use of a few materials, carefully focused, that
combine to offer opportunities for a flowing, changing
synesthesia. Using gentle, evanescent, and inviting contours
and textures, the piece delivers the essentials that Wallace
Stevens postulated for the contemporary artwork: it is
abstract, it gives pleasure, and it changes.
Synesthesia, a synergy of the senses, can be considered
a subjective mirror to the Pythagorean idea that various
phenomena of the objective world - geometry, numbers,
and music - have a common creative source and pattern,
audible in the music of the spheres; or, perhaps, in the
“audible light” of the aurora borealis.
By inviting a synesthetic response, Hill’s work stimulates the
viewer to wonder about a possible unity behind the various
physical phenomena which the senses are registering. This
artwork thus recapitulates on its own scale an effect of
nature; for people through the millennia have been inspired
to wonder by the aurora borealis, and indeed indigenous
cultures around the arctic have reverenced the northern
lights as prime creations of the spirit world. The vast spaces
and far horizons of the northern environment, visible in
these photographs, may lead even a modernized viewer to
consider the elements which make up the globe as a whole,
and their possible confluence in some primal harmony, of
which the lights seem to offer a glimpse.
Apparently simple, at first glance, Hill’s photographs in fact
reach boldly for the elemental materials of the created world:
light and darkness, earth and sky, and the geometries of lines,
globes, and curves, composed within a perfect shape - the
square frame of the medium-format Hasselblad camera.
Light in these works is both subject, that which is seen, and
the condition for seeing - the “master light of all our seeing,”
as Wordsworth described the imagination. Light, the most
spiritualized of the four elements, takes almost tangible form
in the green bars and curves of the auroras, which snake
among the other elements of air, earth, and (often frozen)
water. The ethereal is understood in terms of the earth, and
the earth is seen as animated by celestial light.
This meeting of different elements occurs within a sphere
implied by the emphatically curved horizons of the earth, in
photos taken with a fish eye lens. Shape, it seems, is in the
relativistic eye of the beholder. For these dramatic curves of
light and land remind us that, since Einstein, we understand
that space and light rays are not rectilinear but curvilinear,
bending around objects of matter - such as, for instance,
planets. The planetary unity of the earth’s globe is invoked
by the curvature in these photos, a unity that connotes the
psychic wholeness which Jung associated with the circle; yet
the completion of the circle lies tantalizingly beyond the
square of the frame.
Implied completions and presences are everywhere in
these photos - in the two empty chairs, for instance, which
are suspended between terrestrial and celestial fires in one
of the collection’s most unforgettable images. In exploring
absence, this artist also explores loss, communal and
personal, and her familial losses are recalled.
With unusual delicacy, this work fulfills Anna Hill’s stated
intention: “to re-address the interconnectedness of life,
death and celestial events through sensory perception,
interaction and emotion.” Working with the elemental
materials of the created world, she reminds us of the
correspondences between material and ethereal, part and
whole, and nature, imagination, and the seeing eye. The
beauty of these images is visceral, with their green visitations
and snow-swept horizons, but the connections they make
are subtle. Like the aurora borealis itself, Auroral Synapse is
a work of connections at once small and grand, moving from
the micro-informational level of the brain synapse, with all
its lightning-connective power, to the cosmic connectedness
of the Pythagorean “music of the spheres” that unites
geometry, astronomy, sound and optics. The modality of
the synapse runs all through the varied encounters within
Hill’s project; brief energetic exchanges with people or sites
produce a system of lasting meanings and connections.
These carefully ordered compositions are not without
tensions. A dog jumps against a fence which the lens has
turned spherical, as if nature were imprisoned by the
Cartesian grid we’ve placed on our globe. A radio tower
dwarfs a vertically aspiring tree. Green light ignites beside
a school at twilight. And yet, the quidities and oddities of
a particular setting, with its huskies, fences, frozen lakes,
observatories, wooden churches and snow-mobile tracks,
are seen as points connected within a larger whole.
Looking into Auroral Synapse we realize that the northern
lights are a primeval “sound and light show” of vast scale and
delicate subtlety. We see, too, that Hill’s work represents a
suitably holistic yet technologically informed response to the
range of atmospheric, terrestrial, and human events in and
around this “audible light.”
Happily, the creativity represented by Auroral Synapse has
fed into further projects which do not diminish but in fact
extend the impressive scope seen here. Space Synapse
Systems, under Hill’s direction, is developing an interactive
artwork, called The Symbiotic Sphere, which will allow those
aboard the International Space Station to interact with
terrestrial participants.
As a whole Anna Hill’s work maps extreme and therefore
revelatory positions within a human dream of global
inclusiveness, the conceptual frontiers of which range from
the nearness of breath, through the unique qualities of regions
like Finnish Lapland, to the grand stage of the night sky upon
which the eloquent drama of the aurora borealis unfolds.
- Robert Monroe
1M / 1M Lamada prints mounted on aluminum dybond. Shot with fish eye Hassleblad lens, Finnish Lapland, March 2003

A spatialized soundtrack of ambient field recordings, low radio frequencies from the Earth’s upper atmosphere, Kantele, slide
guitar, vocals and harmonica recorded in Lapland accompanied these images.

Auroral Arch
Kopello,
Lapland.

3rd March 2003

Preceding pages
Kopello Village
School
Lapland by night.

5th March 2003

School Husky
Kopello,
Lapland.

7th March 2003 Village road

Kopello,
Lapland.

7th March 2003

Previous pages
Ivalo school Ivalo school
playground Lapland by night.
Lapland by night.

8th March 2003 8th March 2003

Communications
Tower
Lake Inaari,
Lapland.

10th March 2003

Frozen river with
radar
Sodankyla,
Lapland.

13th March 2003

Sodankyla
Geophysical
Observatory-radar
Sodankyla,
Lapland.

13th March 2003

Aurora and stars
Sodankyla,
Lapland.

16th March 2003

Preceding pages
Sixteenth Century New grave,
Church Sodankyla
Sodankyla, Churchyard
Lapland. Sodankyla,
Lapland.

17th March 2003

Fire on frozen river

Sodankyla,
Lapland.

17th March 2003

The Remote Auroral Suit “The Remote Auroral Suit” is an interactive performance
piece, a prototype outfit inspired by my research and
development at Sodankyla Geo-physical Observatory.
The suit is a hybrid receiver and transmitter for use in
remote Arctic regions. The suit will amplify aurora (upper
atmosphere) sounds and transmit them wirelessly to
interactive art and design scenarios.
I developed the idea in response to reconsidering how the
Artist as receiver saturation of technology may act as a double edge sword
and transmitter as we gradually loose our perceptual and sensorial ranges
through urbanisation and development.
> Wireless Satellite communications for transfer of http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/user_mode.htm
Bio-medical and environmental atmospheric data to
interactive art and design scenarios.
> Benefits to public- creates access to science data,
technology transfer, increased environmental awareness
and experiential intimacy with remote experiences
through interactive art
> The Remote Suit is suppor ted by an Irish Ar ts
Council Special Projects Grant 2005 and the
European Space Agency
> The work in progress was presented at the Tate Modern
at “user_mode” an International Symposium on emotion
and intuition in interactive art and design in May 2003
 Lyrics to Foxes Fire There is no winged creature
Moth, fly or bee,
Nor even the insane man
In the valley of sadness;
That we should not sit with
And by sitting understand.

There is no place
The Interactive Through this artwork I set out to explore subjective,
Stream or thorn,
Installation at intuitive and indigenous responses to celestial phenomena.
Grennam Mill A combination of anthropology of place, scientific insight No matter how remote
into the auroras and local creativity and folklore is explored. No fold of rock,
An interactive contact mic connects the audience’s breath
Whether north south east or west
with the visual output of the aurora. This aspect of the That from us is not born.
audience participation was based on the folklore that I was
told in Koppelo of singing and whistling to the auroras to
bring the spirits closer.
Though Africa’s heart may seem afar
9th to 17th And the moon1s reach distant to our touch,
August, 2003 Yet we are of them and they,
They are of us.

Inspired by “Ni Ceadmhach Neamh Shuim”

Interaction shot and by Sean O Riordain.
Interaction installation
photographs: Translation and re-working by Iarla O Lionaird

Auroral Synapse in Interaction and spatial

collaboration with sound design consultancy
Iarla O’Lionaird Jason Bruges and
(Realworld Records) Martyn Ware

Kilkenny Arts Festival Thanks to: Lapland Arts

Grennam Mill, Thomastown, Council, Irish Arts Council,
Co Kilkenny Ireland. Esa Trunen Sodankyla
Saturday 9th to 17th Geophysical Observatory,
August, 2003 Mark Szasy, camera man.
The Journey The trip began as my quest to document and experience
the “Northern Lights”.
Together with video cameraman Mark Szassy, I travelled to
Finnish Lapland in the Arctic Circle to become enraptured
by the small community of Koppelo where I’d been given a
residency in the village school.
Here during sub-zero nights, we waited on the frozen river
with barking dogs and moonlight accompaniment. We
experienced the first aurora “crown” on the third night. I felt
as if I was being sucked upwards towards the night sky by
it’s radiating crown of light. I felt transported momentarily
into a Blake painting by the perceptual overload. It was an
immensely humbling yet uplifting experience.
Village life mutated into a less enchanted ‘Grimms Brothers’
scene and the rural idyll of sleighing children and snow-
laden purity was overshadowed by an attempted murder.
On the fourth day, Kopello became a national crime scene
and police flew up from Helsinki to investigate the charred
house in the wood. Perceptions of place transformed and
puppies and playgrounds took on sinister proportions. This
was the end of a long dark winter of twenty four hour
darkness and it was taking it’s toll.
I travelled with a fish eyed Hasselblad, forensically freezing
time and becoming intimately adjoined to its simple
mechanisms. Counting pink elephants with frozen fingers
and tripod poised on the icy permafrost - sipping vodka to
alleviate the chill; such was the nocturnal Koppelo routine.
By day, impromptu interviews and conversations opened
up the inner psyche of Kopello through music, folklore and
song. The local Kantelee player Marti Sala, a master of his
art-an ancient instrument of Russian descent, played his
own compositions in his forest home. Discovering he is also
an artist, he invited us down to the local hospital to see his
“Room for saying goodbye” a symbolic display of precious
stones and stained glass in the morgue.
Helli, daughter of the reindeer farmer “sings to the
aurora” in the school gym in the twilight blueness of dusk.
She has an exquisitely melancholic yet innocent voice.
Vessa Torma, the Country and Western schoolteacher
plays the slide guitar and the soundtrack takes shape:
comic, beautiful and mysterious.
Next stop following a danzling sunlit bus ride across the and a balaclava, I test out my silver “interactive” tin foil
snow is Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory where I ‘d suit - a template inspired by conversations with Esa and
made plans to meet Esa Trunen, a scientist investigating ideas of receiving ,transmitting and amplifying the sounds
geo magnetic sounds associated with the aurora. of the aurora.
Indigenous communities through out the Arctic Circle have
folklore describing the aurora “singing and whistling” as it It is a long exhilarating night, exhausted yet satisfied, the fire
approaches Earth. burns a slow hole through the ice that ruptures and rumbles
beneath us.
Science to date has been dismissive on the basis of no
“evidence”. Dr. Esa Turunen, Head of the Aeronomy Division
at Sodankyla has an exceptional passion for his research and
a collaboration is born.
The aurora finally arrives in a tantalising display on the last
night at Sodankyla. Wrapped up in six layers of thermals
Artists Biog
Anna Hill is a Dublin based interactive artist working with
medical and astronomical science. She studied fine art
sculpture at Saint Martins, the National College of Art
and Design Dublin as an exchange student and the Royal
College of Art London. She continued her practice whilst
working with children’s play schemes, a contract with
women’s aid and art therapy work with mental health at the
Studio Upstairs, the Diorama Centre, London.
Born in London, Hill has now been resident in Dublin for
four years, working as an artist in residence at the Irish
Museum of Modern Art and at the Fire Station Artists
Studios who provided her with the support to initiate both
the Space Synapse and Auroral Synapse projects.
In 2003 she established Space Synapse Ltd, a high potential
start-up company based at the Digital Depot in the Digital
Hub, Dublin. The company’s focus is Cultural Space research,
making the human experience of Space travel widely
available and relevant to life on Earth through interactive art
and design, education and outreach.
The first contract was successfully completed in May 2004:
a preliminary analysis for an interactive artwork for the
Columbus Module of the International Space Station. Hill is
currently working developing a Post Doctoral research base
and trans national partnerships for Space Synapse Ltd and
continues her work as a practicing artist.
www.spacesynapse.com
Publication:
This publication has been made possible with the support of the Irish Arts Council
Published by Space Synapse Ltd
Essay by Robert Monroe
Designed & Produced by Image Now
Sponsored by Image Now
Production assistance: Sadhbh McCarthy
Research and Development trip:
The Lapland Arts Council
The Irish Arts Council Travel and Mobility
The Fire Station Artsists Studios Dublin
Jussi Ängeslevä, Equipment and local knowledge
Mark Szazsy, video cameraman
Esa Trunen, Sodankyla Observatory
Henna Harri and Helena Törmä - Lapland Arts Council
For the production of Auroral Synapse:
A special thanks to my creative audio collaborator Iarla O’Lionaird
For Sound & Interaction design consultancy:
Martyn Ware of Illustrious and Jason Bruges
Brian McDonald, Simon Mc Mahon, editor, Headfirst Post Production Facilities,
Mat Wardle, Phillip Ryan
Education:
1999 Royal College of Art London MA Fine Art Sculpture
1990 Central / Saint Martins School of Art London: BA Hons Fine Art Sculpture
1989 NCAD Dublin School of Art & Design, Ireland: Exchange student
Solo exhibitions:
2003 Auroral Synapse in collaboration with Iarla O’Lionaird
The Kilkenny Arts Festival, Ireland
1999 Foetal Space MA Fine Art show at the Royal College of Art, London
1997 View from Within at the Project Arts Centre Dublin
1996 Still Like Dust I Rise ,The City Arts Centre Dublin
1996 Still Like Dust I Rise ,Saint Bartholomew the Great, London EC1
1992 Images After Life, Kingsgate Gallery London
Selected Group exhibitions:
2004 Auroral Synapse artwork at the Royal Institution London, UK
“The Future of Sound Part Two “
2004 Exhibit 6 at the Digital Hub, Dublin, Ireland
2000 Radio Halo : artists working on the theme of astronomy at Jodrell Bank
Science Centre UK
1999 Nerve Systems Institute of Contemporary Art London, UK
1999 Multiples Temple Bar Gallery Dublin
1999 Jibby Beane’s Articultural Show Southbank, London
1998 Blackout-an Exhibition of Light Art London
1998 Artists Using Photography BA Executive Lounge London
Awards/honours
2005 Special Projects Arts Council of Ireland
2004 Shortlist prize for Central Bank Competition for the design of a
Euro Coin to commemorate the Irish Mathematician Hamilton
2004 Arts council of Ireland publications award
2004 BAFTA Interactive Committee
2003 Cultural Relations Committee award for presentation at International
Astronautical Congress, Vancouver Canada October 2004
2004 ESTEC workshop supported by the European Space Agency, Leonardo/Olats,
The Ours Foundation and the International Academy of Astronautics
2003 British Academy of Film and Television nominated Auroral Synapse for an
interactive BAFTA award in the category of best “interactive art installation”
2003 Arts Council of Ireland travel grant.
2003 Enterprise Ireland Incubation Unit at the Digital Hub
2003 Lapland Arts Council Residency
2003 European Space Agency Contract.
1999 RCA MA Thesis On Mind and Matter: Towards a new consciousness
Awarded commendation
1997 Research trip to Arizona USA to visit Light Artist James Turrell
Sponsored by British Airways
1996 Royal College of Art (MA) Bursary
Symposiums / Conferences
2004 Presentation at Synergies and Signatures Symposium, Cork, Ireland
2004 Presentation at The Royal Institution London “The Future of Sound Part Two “
2004 Paper and Presentation at the Sights and Sounds of Space Session
International Astronautics Congress Vancouver, Canada
“Auroral Synapse” Soundtrack
Featuring location recordings from Lapland
Special thanks to:
Heli Huovinen, Martti Salo and Vesa Törmä. Esa Turunen at Sodankylä Geophysical
Observatory, Mark Szaszy
“Foxes Fire” Soundtrack
Written and performed by Iarla O‘Lionaird
Published by Real World Music Ltd.
Featuring Location recordings by Anna Hill
3D spatialized by Martyn Ware and Tim Scott for Illustrious
Iarla O’Lionaird appears courtesy of Real World Records Ltd / Virgin Records Ltd.
Thanks to:
Esa Turunen at Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory. Barrow-nore-suir rural development
Ltd. “Line 6” music equipment, Pol Brennan, Ciaran Lynch
AUDIO CD with print and credits
Published by Space Synapse Ltd
The Digital Depot, The Digital Hub, Thomas Street, Dublin 8 Ireland
Auroral Synapse Copyright Anna Hill 2003
Iarla O’Lionaird / Realworld 2003
Essay copyright Robert Monroe 2004
2004 Presentation at Trondheim Electronic Arts Center Innovation Festival, Norway
2004 Paper and presentation to the 7th Space & Arts workshop “Space : Science
Technology and the Arts” at ESTEC, the Space Research and Technology
Center, European Space Agency, Noordwijk, Holland.
2003 Presentation at “the Future of Sound Part One” BAFTA Piccadilly, London
2003 Presentation at The Tate Modern, London User_ Mode: an International
Symposium on Interactive art and Design
2002 Breakout Session at Art Science 2002 ASCI Conference, New York, U.S.A.
2002 Presentation at “RADICAL “Creative Europe and European Creatives
Saint Martins School of Art London UK
2002 Presentation of work at ISCAN -Irish Science Centres Awareness Network-
a conference on the science / arts interface, Dublin Ireland
1999 Presentation “Know Thyself-Art and Science of the human body”
Oxford University UK European Science Foundation Committee for the
Humanities hosted by Artakt
1999 Presentation to UK Art /Space Forum, Lux Centre London UK
Selected press and bibliography:
2004 Crossings Paper- Space Synapse Systems- for the Electronic Journal of Art
and Technology Published by the University of Dublin Ireland
2004 Irish Tatler “The Artisan-North Star” feature profile by Ella Mc Sweeney
2004 “Future tense” RTE Radio One Feature interview. A special edition on the
interface between science and art.
2004 New Architecture magazine -Papadakis Publishers Feature by Marcos Lutyens
2003 “Cream of Kikenny Arts Festival “ by Aiden Dunne The Irish Times
2003 “Rattlebag” Arts Program- National radio feature-RTE1 Interview
2003 “Northern Lightshow” by Marianne Hartigan -Music and Visual Art Feature
The Sunday Tribune
2000 “Spectacular Bodies-The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo
to Now” Hayward Gallery publication Reference : Foetalspace in essay by
Marina Wallace.
2000 “Strange and Charmed-Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts”
Gulbenkian Foundation Publication Chapter by Ken Arnold “Between
Explanation and Inspiration “
2000 The Guardian ‘Radio Halo
1999 The Independent RCA Show ‘Foetalspace’ with photograph by Peter Macdiarmid
1997 Sunday Tribune art review by Aiden Dunne
1997 Catalogue essay by Roger Malbert (View From Within)
1996 Family Tree, Independent Magazine Feature by Anne McHardy
and David Modell
Selected work experience
2004/2003 Project Director and CEO Space Synapse Ltd Dublin Ireland
2003 Visiting Lecturer, Media Department, Lapland University Finland
2003 Irish Museum of Modern Art- Artists Panel Dublin Ireland
2003 Visiting Lecturer, MA Contemporary Visual Arts, Falmouth College of Arts,
Cornwall, U.K.
2002 Associate Researcher, SMARTLAB at Central Saint Martins
2002 Artistic Consultant with The Design Laboratory @ Central Saint Martins,
Centre of the Cell Project, London Alsop Architects
2001 Visiting Lecturer Limerick College of Art, Sculpture BA
2001 Concepts for Interactive Artwork for the Afro Celt Sound System World
Tour Contract with Realworld Records.
All intellectual property rights reserved - no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic
mechanical or otherwise without prior permission in writing from the publisher.