“Sound from Light, Paper, and Ether. A Journey into the Origins of Experimental Electronic Music” at MOMus – Museum of Modern Art – Costakis Collection

MOMus – Museum of Modern Art – Costakis Collection, located at Moni Lazariston in Thessaloniki, presents a new exhibition from Saturday, December 20, titled “Sound from Light, Paper, and Ether. A Journey into the Origins of Experimental Electronic Music.”

Through this exhibition, lost and often forgotten ideas surrounding the art of sound and music technology in the Soviet avant-garde of the early 20th century are brought to light, alongside presentations of some of the most important figures of the period and the pioneering fields of research they explored.

Among the most groundbreaking researchers featured are Arseny Avraamov, who introduced new conceptual and technological ways of understanding sound as an artistic material and devised the technique of Ornamental Sound, and Leon Theremin, who ushered in new electronic approaches to music, developing countless projects aimed at combining sound with color, gesture, smell, and touch.

Visitors to the exhibition are given the opportunity to play the theremin–the first electronic musical instrument that could be played without any physical contact; to dance on the terpsitone, a platform where bodily movements are transformed into corresponding tones; and to “listen” to light and the electromagnetic field. Animated films from the 1930s featuring artificial soundscapes created using graphic (drawn) sound techniques, as well as music composed with the variophone by Evgeny Sholpo-an optical synthesizer that used sound waves cut onto cardboard discs rotating in sync with film-add further dimensions to the exhibition space.

The materials and reconstructions presented in the exhibition come from the archive and laboratory of Andrey Smirnov, in dialogue with selected artworks from the Costakis Collection of MOMus.

Andrey Smirnov is a physicist, interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, collector, and author. He is the founder of the Theremin Center and the author, among other publications, of the monograph Sound In Z: Experiments In Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia (Walther Koenig & Sound and Music, London, 2013). Since 2023, Andrey Smirnov has been living in Thessaloniki, where he founded 3ERKALO (Mirror), a space dedicated to contemporary electroacoustic music and sonic–performative arts. He also collaborates with MOMus – Museum of Modern Art – Costakis Collection as the specialist responsible for the operation of the Experimental Sound Laboratory.