artist
Frank Ekeberg
Norway
Frank Ekeberg is a transdisciplinary artist, music composer and researcher working in the intersection of the natural and the constructed. His work explores issues of ecology, time, spatiality and transformation, with a particular focus on nature spaces, technopolitics, and the interplay between human and other-than-human worlds.
Ekeberg’s research-based approach to art-making often involves collaborations within as well as beyond the art field, including citizen science and projects involving the social and natural sciences, and the humanities. Field recordings, site-specificity, and integration of spatial elements as means of artistic expression and communication are at the core of most of his projects. Primarily working with sound and using obsolete as well as emerging technologies, Ekeberg’s artistic output includes generative installation art, sound sculptures, immersive electroacoustic music, photography, video, and interactive audio-visual creations.
Frank Ekeberg
Skog og li og bekker forbi, 2025
Generative, solar-powered sound sculpture; Metal, wood, solar power system, speaker horn drivers, computer, audio amplifier
Voices and melodies echo from a time when Norwegian folklore was neither purely fact nor purely fable, when the boundary between human culture and the vast non-human realm was permeable. The work is based on descriptions and stories of a time when humans and other-than-humans were closer to one another and could understand each other, when the distinction between human and nature was not clearly defined. Norwegian folklore, with its ambivalent relationship to sorcery laws and witch trials, links human nature to non-human nature in various ways. The sound elements in the work are inspired by legends and stories about the “huldrefolk”—creatures with magical abilities and a close connection to nature and farming. Both women and men could fall victim to the hulders, who lured people with their beautiful voices. In the legal texts of sorcery laws implemented from the 16th century onwards, one can recognize descriptions of abilities once attributed to the huldrefolk.
Skog og li og bekker forbi (Forests and hills and streams passed) focuses on the liminal space—the historically ambiguous in-between realm—between humans and other-than-humans, as found in folklore, legends, and oral culture in Norway.
