Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM

Edwin van der Heide

Interact with Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM via FILE ARCHIVE

FILE SÃO PAULO 2025: SYNTHETIKA – Art and Technology – Installations
Electronic Language International Festival

Spiral of Time — Amazonas Brazil — UFAM – Netherlands

Spiral of Time captures and stages the diverse soundscape of a specific location over the course of several years. By documenting the unique natural, cultural, spatial, and temporal dynamics of a place, the work honors the contributions of all its actors. Every hour, a one-minute recording is made, resulting in a vast sonic archive over time. It is accessible online through a spiral-shaped interface, allowing listeners to explore the cyclical patterns revealed by navigating the material across different time intervals. 

Since July 17th, 2024, the artist has been recording the sounds of the square in front of MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona). It is a very interesting, diverse, and vibrant urban space. The work is accessible online via https://www.macba.cat/en/spiral-of-time-placa-dels-angels/ and will also be presented physically in the museum starting July 10th, 2025.

Edwin is expanding the project to include other recording locations around the world—not only in urban contexts (dominated by humans) but also in areas governed by nature. The artist dedicated himself to a recording site in the Amazon region. Since February 11th, 2025 Spiral of Time has been installed at the Amazon Rainforest surrounding The UFAM (Federal University of Amazonas) in Manaus. It is home to one of the world’s largest urban forest fragments. Completely surrounded by the dense urban matrix of Manaus, this forest has been isolated since the late 1980s. The forest retains rich ecological features, including areas of mature terra-firme forest, late-stage secondary vegetation, and small patches of white-sand forests. This unique setting offers a rare opportunity to study tropical forest dynamics within a metropolitan environment. 

Spiral of Time-UFAM immerses the listeners in the acoustic life of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. This contrast between the natural rhythms of the forest and the human-made patterns of the city enriches the broader narrative of the Spiral of Time, offering a deeper reflection on coexistence, change, and continuity across different environments.

BIO

Edwin van der Heide is an artist, composer, and researcher focused on sound, space, and interaction. His work pushes the boundaries of musical composition toward spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. He creates installations, performances, and immersive environments where the audience is placed at the center, encouraged to engage sensorially and investigatively.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

Atmospheric Forest
Atmospheric Forest is a large scale VR point-cloud installation that visualizes and sonifies the relations between the forest and climate. It reveals the interaction patterns between the pine-tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient Swiss Alpine forest, and weather conditions in this valley, effected by drought. The trees do not only produce oxygen, but they are living bodies who breath too. I.e., they emit part of carbon dioxide, sometimes even up to 20 perc. from what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their lives back into the atmosphere. Atmospheric Forest explores the effects of drought on local forest ecosystems, and how such stress situations influence production of resin and volatile emissions (such as usual pine-tree scent).