Stephen Hurrel’s Beneath and Beyond: Seismic Sounds is an audio visual installation at Glasgow’s Tranway, as part of the annual GI festival for Visual Art. The installation presents a realtime feed of seismic shifts recorded from data of 100 of so seismic monitoring stations around the Earth. We are presented with the sound of the various vibrations going on within the Earth’s core at that very moment. We also see two visual screens showing graphical displays of particularly large tectonic shifts or events at that one time.

Beneath and Beyond continues Hurrel’s inquiry into our relationship to the natural world whilst living in a technologically advanced, as well as ecologically critical, period of time. In exploring how computer software - developed for the Internet - can bring experiences of real world environmental ‘events’ into the gallery, he has created meeting points between nature, culture and technology. Further, he examines the potential of the gallery as an interface to discuss social, cultural and ecological issues.

Hurrel’s perception of both nature and technology has been shaped by the picturesque landscape of the west coast of Scotland - where the deep lochs became ideal sites to house nuclear submarines. These symbols of efficient, total destruction were in direct contrast to the ancient landscape; shaped by the slow forces of the ice age and massive tectonic shifts. Against this background grew an interest in the idea of ‘the sublime’ in nature - a ‘greatness’ that nothing else can be compared to and that is beyond measurement or imitation - and an interest in how artists have sought to represent it.

In Beneath and Beyond, and other works that examine the increasing divergence between the natural world and technological ‘progression’, he explores how the ‘tools’ of the twenty-first century can be used to posit a more symbiotic relationship between nature and technology.

You can check out another of Hurrel’s works — The Sound of The Wind Looks Like This, Blackpool — here. It is a permanent public art installation at the far end of the South Shore Promenade, Blackpool. Six light poles react directly to wind speed and wind direction via a wind vane, an anemometer and interactive hardware and software.