Bergen

VUMA Soner honours the voices, stories and talent of people of colour in Scandinavia. It is an app created by VUMA Projects with geo-triggered immersive audio experiences. This chapter of the app contains a collection of thoughts, reflections, and conversations, remembered or spontaneous, tied to specific landmarks, buildings and areas in the city of Bergen. The authors are all living in Bergen, some speaking in Norwegian and some in English. The sounds can be accessed in six central locations through a free downloadable app, which can be combined into one long, or multiple small walks. Production of the app is supported by the City of Bergen, the Arts Council of Norway and BEK.

How to access the appTo find the app, go to an app store (Google Play or App Store) on your mobile device. Search for “VUMA Soner” and download it for free. Create an account and select the walk. The audio experiences are linked to GPS locations and will be triggered when you walk into the zone of your selected walk. If your signal is weak in some areas, you can download the walks onto your device beforehand. Just be sure to keep the GPS on.

Kalfarlien 18, a home on Fløien designed by Einar Oscar Schou in 1909 and now in need of restoration, could have been refurbished into a facelifted historical showpiece: Schou also designed the National Theater, and the Bergen Kommune recognizes the villa’s cultural heritage. But the villa’s owners resist a vision of history that obliterates traces of natural decay. RestOration: Kalfarlien 18 reimagines the decaying villa as an eco-home quietly rebuffing the rigged hunger for new stuff. RestOration: Kalfarlien 18 recreates aspects of the villa even as its purview stretches far beyond the villa. An ambient soundscape creates a “lived in” homey feeling and moves guests through our interactive installation, to be located in UiB’s Humanities Library. At the center is an e-waste sculpture built on the myth of Narcissus and Echo that triggers aleatory poems when guests touch the trash. A tablet game features the villa’s original architectural drawings and decorative design elements. RestOration: Kalfarlien 18 is an e-lit ecopoem. Whether it’s the faint singing of a woman in the shower, or the functional e-waste, or the satisfying click of an actual Kalfarlien 18 doorknob unlocking pieces of the tablet game—RestOration juxtaposes the care economy of a home with the dizzying pace and alarming toxicity of technologic obsolescence. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

This film was created in a very short amount of time during an experimental course in Bergen, Norway.

The assignment consisted of everyone receiving a fictional character who had recently experienced a "strange event" and was sent to Bergen to try and figure out what the root cause was. Each student was put into a group of about four, and it was up to the team to figure out a way to tell a narrative, while still weaving together some very random stories, events, and details. Our group decided on showing our narrative via a film. There are perhaps some gaps in the narrative logic, but perhaps a little character info can help fill those.

Jackson Sullivan: woke up on day on an island in his hometown with strange ruins tattooed onto his arm. He heads to Bergen to decipher them.

David Butler: an older gentlemen possessing the diary of his explorer grandfather. Inside is information regarding Norse ruins...

Aurora Berg: a British spy is doing her best to warn the world of potential harm.

Liam Omar: a scuba diver who notices the strange rise in water levels in the Bergen area. What can it mean?

(Source: Vimeo description by Dane Pedersen)