Boris Acket

Boris Acket has that one thing all great artists seem to possess – a fascinated mind. Throughout our conversation, the Amsterdam-based artist would excitedly share an interesting facts about sound, nature, and art that moved him. From the hallucinatory effects of dusk to wonders of the natural soundscape, sharing ideas is who he is.

Boris’ works have been presented the world over at museums and festivals such as Mutek MX, DGTL Amsterdam, Dark Matter Berlin, NXT Museum, and De School, to name but a few.

Using the natural world as inspiration, Boris utilizes the concise characteristics of machines to produce works that replicate the unpredictability of nature. Control, surrender, nature, and machine all become one through his works, taking small moments in life and gigantifying them into wondrous splendour.

His deep involvement with the Nijmegen-based light festival Schemerlicht is likely his grandest example of this trait. What started as a curious exploration into an old practice of dusking turned into a creative experiment that has brought together artists, scientists, and the curious eyes of the public for the last three years.  

His focus of late however, has been the recently released exhibition at The Dark Rooms in Berlin. For the first time, twelve of his most prolific works were presented throughout the light-starved industrial setting of the Willner Brewery.

We spoke to Boris a short while ago to discuss his origins with Schemerlicht, his latest exhibiton, and more.

Tell me about the origins of Schemerlicht and your involvement with the festival.

In Dutch, Schemerlicht is made up of two words that don’t actually combine – dusk and light, which is a bit of a contradiction. What we loved most about the name however, was its history. It was based on a ritual by a group of people trying to save energy back in the 40s and 50s in Holland. They coined it schemer, which translates into the verb of dusk or dusking.

During the time of dusk, your eyes change, and it becomes perfectly normal to hallucinate – that’s why we called it Schemerlicht. It’s this contradiction between darkness and light. A beautiful moment in the day when things can happen without you even trying.

When it comes to hallucinations, there are many ways to induce them. The obvious ways are drugs, breathing exercises, or deep meditations, but there comes a moment each day in the morning and evening when your eyes do it for you.

That’s where the name comes from. It’s this moment of contemplation that we don’t have anymore. We’re not sitting in front of our windows consciously gazing at the sky as it becomes darker and darker. During the pandemic, however, we were able to unintentionally reintroduce that ritual.

The idea for the festival was initiated by a friend of mine, Dida. He is a player in the Dutch nightlife scene who initiated a credible music festival here in Holland called Drift. He’s the one who tickled me with the idea of making a light festival for children. We began co-developing it after a conversation about the Botanical Garden in Nimech. The Garden is comprised of different landscapes that work together, so it’s not like a classical plant museum.

Essentially, it’s different groups of plants working together as one ecosystem. We then decided it might be nice to shift the idea from a children’s festival towards a light festival that uses the medium of audiovisual art. The aim was to tell, or make tangible, these scientific research papers, beautifully bringing these science and art stories together while presenting them to a broader audience. That was the starting point, I would say.

Personally, for me as an artist – as it was with everyone – the pandemic was a difficult time. I spent so much effort continuously looking for new stages and contexts to present my art, and I was extremely privileged to be a sort of artist in residence at Schemerlicht for the first three years. Now we have a new curator, but it was a very beautiful stage for me to develop.

For example, in the first year, we worked with Gordon Hampton who is an Acoustic Ecologist. His entire practice is about listening to the world. This [practice of listening] and his way of recontextualizing how we use our ears, and what they actually are, taught me a lot. I would say this festival opened a door towards what science and other ways of thinking can do for audio-visual art and what kind of stories you can tell with it. These past three years have been pretty inspirational.

What are some of the works you are presenting at this years festival?

We did a triptych for the first three years. It was about the elements of water, earth, and air. As we have a broad audience, we try to take clear and understandable themes and present them with super layered works. They are understandable from a basic aesthetic or experiential level. Then, if you want, you can dive deep into the layers of the festival and the thematics.

With the new triptych coming up, we wanted to move away from the ecological thematics and drift more into the themes of consciousness and time. We recently coined the new chapters as space, time, and consciousness.

We experience space in a way that’s limited to our senses, right? But we are not thinking about it too much. A few years ago, Marshmallow Laser Feast made this beautiful work about how animals see and listen to the world. This is a work that we are trying to get to the festival. It’s a beautiful that allows you to experience the world through the eyes of various animals.

Johnny Le Marche is going to do laser projection work on a tree, redefining the space of that tree while showing what the actual spaces are within the tree by using simple projections on it. We also have an artist making letters with mist. These are some of the things we are working with.

I really love that we can approach a broader audience with these themes through this festival. I think a lot of people can really relate to it. For example, you have people who are taking pictures of their children in front of the blue-lit tree – Which is not part of the artistic program – to be then confronted with the work of Marshmallow Laser Feast or Helene Blanc. It’s very nice to bring this kind of work to people who normally never get to see them.

I wanted to ask you about Einder because it has quite an interesting origin story. It was born from a collaboration between you, Elias Mazian, Lumus instruments, and two Ryuji men. Can you share more of the backstory?

Elias and I have been friends for a very long time. We come from the same city. I sort of introduced him to electronic music, and then he went on to play at Trouw, alongside every other important club in Holland. Then he made this really bold move to go into NEDERPOP. He became very inspired by, amongst others, Henry Frinta, which is like a Dutch Reggae collective from the 80s. He then made this very sweet electronic pop album with, in a positive way, naïve song writing.

I asked him what he saw when he closed his eyes and thought about the album. He said that he saw water movements and grass blowing in the wind. This type of kinetic phenomena is both predictable and unpredictable, which means you can watch them forever. With this in mind for the design, I tried to look for a conductor or a guide for natural phenomena on stage. At this time, I was already playing with using lenticular fabric for a stational fee. They get printed with very small 3-dimensional particles. You can have like four or five colors in them if you want. It’s very beautiful, but also really expensive.

I kept looking and found this type of screen material that has specific light properties due to the way it’s knit. When you hold it in front of the light, it splits RGB, for example, and when you place it to recieve sunlight, it will reflect the rays like water. It’s a very strange and beautiful fabric.

With Lumus, well, I was already talking with them for quite a while, and they were moving into developing machinery. We were philosophizing together about a system to shake or move the fabric back and forth. They ended up making these beautiful linear actuators to help us do this. When we were in Amsterdam, which was the first exhibiting location and the first place we played the shows alongside Elias, we found out that we were trying so hard to control something uncontrollable. It was a very poetic thing. This concept has become apparent in my newer with water. It’s this constant friction between control and surrender, which is also in the text about Einder.

What I like so much about it is that we, as humans, are so wired to like things that we can anticipate but not fully predict. We always try to place ourselves outside of nature and control it despite actually being part of it. I think the fact that we get such a natural and profound “in-the-moment” experience in these works also says something about how we relate to nature as humans. That’s something I really liked about that residency. That we came into all those conversations.

It sort of escalated because the fabric is so pleasing to move. When you start moving it front to back, you also want to move it up and down, and then try it with wind and everything else. It naturally became a whole series of works.

In the first year of Schemerlicht, we worked with sociologist Rihanna Vandenborre, whose work revolves around how we relate to nature during our life. We relate most to nature when we are kids and the least when we are older. What I find interesting as I have been working with fabric – and now this new work with water – is that when you enlarge this very small moment into something very big, people seem to return to that childlike state that they lost through adulthood.

When I first started, I graduated and created an echo system, which was the first sort of unpredictable/predictable system I made. I would make the echoes more complex and then start turning all these separate delays from each other. The results were so unpredictable and organic that the echo actually became a filter. When I looked at the fabric piece and then the water piece, I saw this line coming around of all these filters that echo or do something unpredictable within a parametric framework.

It seems to get people into this very intuitive childlike state. After ten years of creating these works, I have noticed this theme starting to emerge, and that’s fun. That’s a really nice thing to discover.

I love that you’re talking about surrender and control. It appears freeing but also otherworldly in a sense.

Yeah, it’s a bit like living.

What’s next for Boris Acket?

There are some museum shows on the planning, but I can not tell all about that yet, more soon!  What I can say however, is that we are working with a sound studio called Cling, Clang, Clong from Berlin as well as a very interesting creative coder, Cory Schneider. For the fabric piece, Cory is making a simulation that emulates swirls in the ocean. It’s a generative system that we can control with very top-line parameters. It will be more like weather conditions than a sine wave. We don’t really know what this sea surface is going to do.

With the collective [Cling, Clang, Clong] we are making weather conditions, and they are making engines to create rain, wind, and thunder. It’s wildly fascinating. A tiny movement in the rain engine can take you aa something that sounds grainy and unnatural to something that moves into the natural world of your sonic experience. I think they called it psychoacoustics because you trick the listener.

For the piece in Berlin, which will open on the 25th of April, we are going to place this digital rain, thunder, and wind engine system as an opposing factor to a beautiful recording of an ocean by Gordon Hampton. The synthetic is going to meet its natural counterpart.

People underestimate how important the natural soundscape is.

Gordon [Hampton] told me this, and it’s really true. If you put a microphone on something, it becomes important! I don’t know if you ever had the sensation of walking around with a field recorder and just turning up the world. To be able to extend your listening to 5 kilometers instead of 500 meters, it’s wild. The world gets so much bigger. The field recorder in this article says: “I love field recording because I feel like an ant. I can just make myself small, and I can make the world big.” – and I love that way of thinking.

I love that about this art form. The fact that you can play with these worlds and moments outside of normal society and recontextualize daily experiences. I did work with a gigantic piece of fabric outside in Amsterdam and the US, and afterward, people told me how they would take note of the wind in the trees. The piece only tricks you to look at the wind – I do nothing. I only hang the fabric, and the rest is the wind. It’s a funny way of reconnecting people to things they are already connected to.

We also have an upcoming collaboration with Lockhart and Hatch, a percussionist collective. They not only opened my eyes towards more niche composers like Stockhausen and John Cage but also to a way of music making that is very different. We are now creating two new works for the exhibition in Berlin that both revolve around frequencies.

There is a microphone series from Stockhausen involving these huge gongs that were specifically made for him. When you have your ear against the gong and move your head, you can hear all these different frequency spectrums. In the middle, you have the crazy stop sound. Then, slowly towards the sides, you get more highs, and then when you start playing it louder, it becomes unbearably loud. We have a shaking solenoid mechanism that we can move, like an old inkjet printer in front of it, and we can also move the microphone so we can compose with the gong. It’s similar to Stockhausen but in a newly emulated way.

The metal slightly differs in timbre when you heat it, and because the sound is only about frequencies, we combined it with light that can emulate the sun. It can get to about 300/400 hundred degrees. We then move this light very slowly past the gong, and in turn, it slowly changes the timbre. The light can only go from low frequencies in orange light to white because it’s analog tungsten. What I like about this one is it has bells that turn really fast, creating this strange doppler effect together. This whole floor of the exhibition is just about this sound landscape research.

I don’t know if you ever had the sensation of being close to church bells, but you really feel the sound. There is this resonance in bells that is in nothing else. It is a landscape. So, on this floor we are going to research sound as a landscape through these two works.