You could say that things are on the up and up for Norwegian artist HC Gilje, whose pairing of light and sound art results in some beautiful, hypnotic installations.Gilje works with real-time environments, installations, live performance, set design and single channel video to create his colorful works, and one of his most recent pieces, a light installation called 7 cirkler, recently debuted at the “Unheard Avant-garde” sound art exhibition at The Center for Art and Media (ZKM). The work consists of, you guessed it, seven circles of animated light and is based on the 1959 musical piece of Danish composer, Else Marie Pade.A diagram created by Else Marie Pade to construct her sound composition, which Gilje used for inspiration.The intent of the exhibition is to establish a dialogue between contemporary artists’ work and works by pioneering Scandinavian electronic musicians. Pade’s piece, which 7 cirkler is based on, was inspired by a visit to the planetarium at the Brussels World Expo in 1958. To emulate the feeling of being in a different universe, she used tone generators and tapes to construct a system of layers (circles) of sound that harmonized into what sounds like just one layer. This is Gilje’s attempt to manifest the composition into a physical work of art.Photos courtesy of HC Gilje.@embovoy