Epicentre, September 2015, Skopje, Macedonia

Epicentre is an audio-visual piece by the artist Kristina Pulejkova and the experimental music duo KNNT. Comissioned by the City Creative Network (CCN) the performance opened the new Nautilus Konstrukt public stage in Skopje, Macedonia. Epicentre uses sounds created from seismic data from the city Skopje as well as imagery from the city’s post 1963 brutalist architecture, proposing a new geo-urban sound specific to the city.

Seismic data sourced from The Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology, IZIIS are made into sonified data loops, which are combined with live music by KNNT, further exploring the capital’s geological and urban sonic identity. The outdoor stage is taken as a focal point that enables cultural diversity in the city’s public domain.

Initially, the work takes the term epicentre from both a seismological and a metaphorical aspect, exploring the city as a geologically and socially shifting environment. In the latter respect, the stage is taken as a cultural epicentre that has the capacity to ‘shake the ground’ of the current complacent cultural realm and brake way for emerging artists working across the creative disciplines.

The data sets are sonified with an ANS Synthesizer emulator, based on the ANS Synthesizer that was used for the soundtrack of the film Solaris (1972) by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, Epicentre draws a connection between Tarkovsky’s futuristic sets and the capital’s concrete futuristic architecture, further echoing the post 1963 idea of rendering Skopje as the city of the future.