This week I have been invited by FON Festival veteran and fellow dweller on the periphery Antye Greie to participate in a conference looking at art in remote places. The conference is taking place on the island of Hailuoto (near Oulu in Northern Finland) in various spaces including the village cafe, a hotel in the fishing port and various places only accessible by walking through the woods that cover most of the island. I’ve now been here for 5 days so have had plenty of time to prepare and get a sense of the place. So far this has included watching Finland win (then lose) an important ice hockey match, exploring the North shore at night (it doesn’t get dark), cycling into town through the woods for supplies and collecting flat stones for a piezo workshop. I also visited Sasu (Vladislav Delay) and Antye’s amazing home studio and picked up a few ideas for the Octopus radio room…

On Friday I visited the local school with Antye to sit in on an editing session for the City Rings project – an international project for young people to create and exchange sound and sonic postcards drawing upon their environment. In this session we caught up with sounds that the other groups in Enfield and Portugal had been recording and composed 3 sonic postcards using Radial and Garageband. Here’s what they sounded like.

The attic of the Marjaniemi tourist info centre is hosting a series of installations and residencies by sound artists, starting today with Carsten Stabenow’s ‘Line-Tilt’ a series of long strings that resonate in response to the wind. By the evening the whole building was starting to gently sing, accompanied by the whirring drone of the radar tower next door. Carsten is the initiator and artistic director of the Tuned City project.

Sound Room installation in progress yesterday. The room opens to the public on Friday. The conference starts tomorrow – read more about it and the Hai Art project in general here.