Pia Van Gelder

Pia van Gelder’s work moves between interactive installation, performance and participatory spaces that invite people to experience energies directly through touch, sound, light and making. He practice has often involved designing and building custom electronic instruments that create sound and video while other works have operated in more participatory engagements, collaborating with the public to develop new understandings. Recently she has turned her attention to thinking about energies in a plural way; how they operate and interact in the world. She has engaged in this research through historical enquiry, looking at archives and interviewing people to produce new artworks and writing that respond to these findings from the scientific to the spiritual.

The Tilting Winds performance lecture is an aesthetic investigation into public perceptions of wind turbines and the phenomena they produce. The presentation brings together creative research that was conducted during a Cementa residency that looked at what people think about wind turbines in and around the town of Kandos. The presentation also considers how these opinions and perspectives might be informed by representations elsewhere. This project asks how we develop relationships with wind turbines through their physical presence, our sensing bodies and the energies they create, be that sound, light, electricity, magnetism (to name a few).