BERGEN ASSEMBLY 2016
PAUL PURGAS AND LOUIS MORENO: INFRASTRUCTURE OF FEELING

Installations
2.9 – 1.10.2016
Hagerupsgården

Opening hours: (Tue-Sun) 11AM–5PM

Infrastructure of Feeling is an apparatus produced by Louis Moreno and artist and curator Paul Purgas, that enables one to feel and think about sound and its relationship with infrastructure.

The project is a response to the emergence in recent decades of new kinds of cognitive infrastructure intended to support and augment how individuals sense and make sense of the world around them. The field of contemporary music, for example, is shaped by new methods of payment, distribution, categorisation and analysis as much as by aesthetic changes in musical form.

The apparatus revolves around a specially produced piece of software programmed to listen to music and analyse the material for mood and sentiment. The experienced mood state of the music is visualised through colour and becomes the basis for an autonomous purchasing process acquiring books for a library contained within the space. The music that stimulates the system is a series of six continuously playing recordings of Norwegian music covering Folk, Choral Music, Classical, Avant-Garde, Pop and Doom Metal roughly corresponding to different moments in Bergen’s economic history.

The apparatus has an allocated budget to spend, assembling what it hears into a library of books that will build over the five weeks. The books will be delivered and stored in the space where visitors will be invited to access them as a resource. At the end of the project the library will be distributed locally, becoming part of Bergen’s cultural memory.