Hunt Kastner

“...The Scandinavian inland is visually uninteresting, monotonous but the snow gives it very special light characteristics and omnipresent power poles produce strange sounds there... A seemingly never-ending stay in this landscape served as the conceptual background for the Sound Flowers project – an interactive kinetic sound installation. Dried and frozen plant stems peeping out from the snow, emitting sounds when touched or swayed by the wind, inspired these kinetic objects; splintery sounds of crackling snow and bursting ice together with the fractal sounds of high voltage being hit by snowflakes became background material for the sounds produced by the Sound Flowers installation. A visitor to the installation does not need those references, though. When walking through the installation s/he creates his/her own unrepeatable soundscapes...”

Petra Vargová 2007


Petra Vargova was born in 1973 in Prague, Czech Republic. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, graduating with a MFA from the School of New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2002. As a Swedish Institute scholar she attended the Art & Technology Programme at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden where she obtained Master of Science in Art and Technology. Vargova has been active on the Czech and international art scene since the 1990s. Her work has been shown worldwide in solo shows, group shows, festivals and conferences. For her projects Vargova received various art awards. Her video project DOA 2 (Dead or Alive 2) is included in the Rhizome ArtBase of The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Vargova is a co-founder and curator for the TransGenesis Biotechnology Art Festival in Prague. Most recently, she was selected as a 2007-8 Fellowship Awardee at the Kala Art Institute in Berkley California.