Sounding Nest Sauna (2016)

The Sounding Nest Sauna, shown at the Mänttä Art Festival 11.6–31.8 2017 in Finland is a combination of two earlier collaborative projects made in collaboration with artist Jan-Erik Andersson. The Sounding Dome Sauna, a garlic-pumpkin shaped sauna, made for the Turku Cultural Capital of Europe year in 2011 and the Bird’s Nest installations made in several cities; Berlin, Chicago, Wakefield, Helsinki, Hyvinkää, Turku, Uppsala, and more.

The tent-sauna’s construction consists of two nest-layers, with recyclable, bright red, PVC plastic in between. The nest-layers are built in the same way as birds build their nests: A continuing process, made of wooden triangles. There are no drawings, and the shape is improvisatory and site-specific.

The interior consists of triangular platforms made of heat treated wood on which wooden chairs, bought from local second hand shops, are mounted, with their legs sawn off. The red plastic is semi-transparent, which means that the “redness” inside changes due to the suns strength and position. In this way, the redness psychologically strengthens the sense of changing heat inside the sauna.

In a similar way, the interactive soundscape attempts to intensify the sense of increasing or decreasing heat. Two sensors inside the sauna, one measuring changes in heat, the other in humidity, produce information to a custom interactive microcontroller system, which mixes sound-clips into an continously changing aggregate. The four speakers inside are situated on top of the plywood “roof”, which directs the steam coming from the heater, towards the visitors sitting in the sauna. The two speakers situated outside on the top of the sauna, have a different soundscape, triggered when people throw water on the heater and the humidity changes.