Fellow’s research leads to collaboration with Sigur Rós
Fellow’s research leads to collaboration with Sigur Rós
The Ára installation at the Schwarzman Centre (image credit: Fisher Studios)
Dr Finn Moore Gerety, a Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, has played a key role in a major new installation at the Schwarzman Centre featuring Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós.
Ára, which runs from 26 June to 19 July, is an immersive listening environment that combines live recordings from Sigur Rós’ orchestral world tour with specially designed lighting and ambient scents to create a multisensory 80-minute experience. Dr Gerety, who is a historian of Asian religion and a global expert on mantras in, helped the band explore how sound such as sacred utterances can be used to transform reality. These insights revealed how Sigur Rós’ music might be able to fulfil a similar purpose and helped to inform elements of the show.
Dr Gerety is Co-Principal Investigator for the MANTRAMS research project, which is seeking to develop the first global study of mantras and is backed by a €9.65 million grant from the European Research Council, one of the largest single awards ever made to humanities research globally – and the first-ever ERC Synergy Grant awarded to the Humanities Division at the University of Oxford. He is currently working on a book project for Oxford University Press entitled This Whole World is OM: Mantra, Yoga, and the Sacred Syllable in Early India.
He commented: “Our hypothesis is that Sigur Rós’ music, and the Ára installation in particular, offers the chance for a transformative experience, and that it might be akin, scientifically but maybe also culturally, to the kind of experience that meditators or yogis cultivate in very different contexts”.
Find out more about Dr Gerety’s research and his collaboration with Sigur Rós in this video.
