THE VALLEY (Dalen)
2019 © Åse Løvgren and Stine Gonsholt
Sound by Alexander Rishaug
HD Video/Stereo 20 min.
2 channel installation
Supported by Arts Council Norway, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond,
The City of Bergen, Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK), OCA,
and Norwegian Knitting Industry Museum.
THE VALLEY (Dalen) is an idea, a fact or event that you already know, which helps you understand or make a judgment about another situation. The Valley transcends the specific territorial boundaries and has entered a world that consists of things fundamentally in motion".
THE VALLEY (Dalen) is the name of this video work by Åse Løvgren and Stine Gonsholt. The work depicts the place called Dale which translates into The Valley. This place is still to a degree synonymous with the valley ́s former textile industry, when the factory buildings were the pivotal center of society. Today the old industrial societies are no longer aligned with their former cosmology. The power of the industrial architecture has lost its status and its surpluses have been left open to new arenas.
The radical new industry that has occupied the old textile factory buildings is digital mining. The buildings are now housing a large server park, mining for the global cryptocurrency - Bitcoin. The textile industry was crucial during the industrial revolution, and has played a major part in laying the foundations for our advanced societies. By connecting the textile industry to the pervasiveness of digital technology in the world today, the video untangles how technology is intertwined with natural resources, local histories, and global economy.
In the video, Dale (The Valley) is used as a prism to look at global changes related to economy, production, digitization, and trade. Løvgren and Gonsholt investigate how these processes affect the site’s status and the relationship between material and immaterial qualities. The moving images and its soundscape leave the nature of Dale and its landscape as the protagonist of the film.
Installation View: Gallery HI10, Skien (NO) 2019
Still from video
Still from video
Still from video
Still from video