Subviola is a sound art collaboration exploring the intersections and boundaries of culture, noise, and place. For their initial project, No Defects, the duo of Bjarnason and Halsell manipulate field recordings from urban and rural spaces of the American Midwest. Railroad locomotives, country meadows, industrial spaces, and Appalachian folk musicians are transformed into washes of protracted and convolving sounds punctuated by disjointed rhythms and vocalizations. This tense and disorienting work reflects the artists' experiences while living in the economically depressed post-industrial "rust belt" and evokes the widespread disillusion in the myths of American industrial and social history. The title comes from the most common of radio messages in the automated system of status reports of railroad lines.
Hilmar Bjarnason (Iceland, 1965) played drums in a rock band before pursuing a career in the arts, focusing primarily on the creation of sound, both as installation, published audio works and collaboration with others working in visual medium. He graduated from the Iceland College of Arts and Crafts in 1997 and continued his education in the Academy of Fine arts in Vienna with Professor Franz Graf and later in The Royal Danish Academy of the Arts in Copenhagen with Professor Torben Christiansen.
David W. Halsell (Spain, 1967) is an experimental media artist who has worked with sound for two decades in performance and recording, primarily exploring the mutable definitions of noise versus information in structure and content. The intersections of the natural and mechanical worlds and perceptual phenomenology have influenced his work in both the visual and sonic arts. Currently Halsell is a Research Associate at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington.