Luke Jaaniste's practice operates across sound, image making, writing and conversation, and there is an openness to his practice that leads to multiple collaborative projects. Across these various forms the emphasis for Jaaniste is placed firmly on the social. This is in an effort to bring to the fore what the artist defines as 'liveliness'—a fundamental, dynamic and generative experience of being in the world.

For BEAF2013, Jaaniste presents two works that are instances of his ongoing PORTAL project. Deploying sets of portable music keyboards within a range of sites, Jaaniste sets up sonic fields that incorporate elements of party, performance and installation. The effect is transporting, otherworldly and complex, but not over-embellished. The first work, PORTAL (red), transforms a workaday boardroom into a spatialised drone-scape that unfolds in subtlety over time and space. The second, PORTAL (blue), incorporates live performers in the creation of a performative sound installation across the multiple, reverberant levels of the Judith Wright stairwell.

Despite its ambient timelessness, PORTAL is still traceable to a specific origin of the cultural confluence of technological and consumer rationales—namely the portability and affordability of now outmoded technology (specifically Yamaha Portasounds, from the early 1980s). Jaaniste's retrieval and use of these 'synths' from the recent past positions the work within a specific relation to the flows and mechanisms of consumer society, reveal a creative ethics based in the second-hand consumer economy that can be seen as interstitial, positively exploitative of late capitalist market shifts.

Both works use a simple set of musical and spatial parameters that paradoxically lead to  a highly variegated set of potential responses and experiential modes. In their enveloping and intimate site-specificity, each work offers us a different mode of address to spectatorship, performative witness, fire escape thoroughfare and meeting room manners. They take us into, and through, experiences as diverse as social self-reflective engagement and quit individual experience. Through PORTAL red and blue you at a space only to then depart from it.