This audiovisual installation presents a speculative being whose essence unfolds as a self-generating assemblage of sound and image. Væren consists of a large oil painting (130 × 140 × 11 cm), portraying a humanoid figure in backlight, where the eyes have been replaced by embedded speakers. The visual obstruction of the ocular sense hints at a radical reconfiguration of sensory hierarchies, inviting the audience to engage with perception as a cross-modal, affective field.
Behind the canvas, a microprocessor, amplifier module, and three MP3 players continuously generate new sonic combinations from a pool of 60 original sound fragments. These fragments are equally distributed across bass, midrange, and high-frequency materials, and composed to include rhythm, melody, texture, and silence. Each player starts with a randomized delay (between 5,000 and 30,000 milliseconds), creating an evolving interplay of layered loops that never repeats the same way twice.
Væren: An Immanent Sonic Portrait Beyond the Human
In Væren, vision is blocked — and replaced. Eyes become speakers. Seeing yields to hearing. This shift invites reflection on perception itself: What happens when sound becomes the primary sense for constituting a subject? What if being is not defined by seeing, but by hearing — not by representation, but by resonance?
The installation resists narrative structure and instead invites perceptual encounters. At any moment, the sonic assemblage may present a single sound, a duet, or a full trio — due to the use of silent files (“blanks”) as dynamic gaps that let some sonic “voices” stand alone before new relationships emerge. The work never presents a fixed identity; it is always in a state of becoming.
Through rhizomatic compositional logic — where no hierarchy governs which sounds should lead or follow — the installation models a subjectivity that is non-human, non-centralized, and purely emergent. Sound fragments were composed to be independently meaningful yet relationally open, allowing every looped encounter to function as a new affective statement. As a result, the portrait becomes not a representation of a being, but an expression of being — temporal, sensorial, and perpetually in transformation.
Deleuzian Perspective: Væren as a Sonic Body Without Organs
Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of assemblage, becoming, and immanence, Væren operates as a real-time immanence machine. It produces its own ontology through difference and repetition, without ever needing to signify or stabilize. The installation is not interactive in a conventional sense — it interacts with itself. In doing so, it enacts a subject without organs, composed of dynamic affects, intensities, and sonic flows.
Each sound fragment functions as a node in a rhizomatic field — connected not through structure, but through compatibility of intensity: timbre, rhythm, or harmonic color. Silence becomes not a lack, but a condition for emergence — a chance for new conjunctions to occur. These conjunctions mirror affective states such as reflection, sensation, and emotion, but without psychological depth. They are pre-subjective events, not expressions of an inner self, but autonomous intensities in the sonic field.
In this way, Væren moves beyond aesthetic representation and into the domain of affective cartography. It does not ask what being is, but allows us to feel how being becomes.
Conceptual Significance
- Immanence: The work contains no external logic or narrative. Everything that happens, happens from within — generated through random microtiming and autonomous sonic logics.
- Assemblage: Sound files, hardware, silence, image, and time form a compositional agencement where no part dominates.
- Repetition with Difference: The millisecond-level randomization avoids structural predictability, making every iteration unique while still internally consistent.
- Rhizome: The sonic field is non-hierarchical and transversal. Connections emerge through affect, not syntax.
- Body Without Organs: The humanoid portrait becomes a field of potentiality — not a stable subject, but a machine for generating sensations and resonances.
More about the Project
Væren was created by painter Ann-Marie Højgaard and soundartist Tao Højgaard in 2024. It exemplifies an approach where artistic installation becomes an epistemological tool: exploring being not through definition, but through affective multiplicity and real-time sensory transformation. The project contributes to ongoing dialogues about posthuman subjectivity, non-representational aesthetics, and embodied knowledge.