On Mediating Space, Sound and Experience: Interviews with situated sound art practitioners2/14/2022
Some time ago now (just before the pandemic in fact) I was interviewed by Nicole Robson, a PhD candidate in Media & Arts Technology at QMUL and a composer, musician and researcher exploring site-specific artworks. It was a nice afternoon talking about the process of making site-specific sound works along with the terms for those involved - us as the makers of this work (my answer was 'an assembler, an aligner of things') and the name for the 'audience' ('participants' for me mainly). I was one of nine interviews alongside other site-specific / responsive artists working with sound: James Bulley, Alex De Little, Roswitha von den Driesch & Jens-Uwe Dyffort, Sebastian Kite, Emma-Kate Matthews, Gerriet K. Sharma, Jeroen Vandesande and John Wynne. Nicole together with co-authors Nick Bryan-Kinns and Andrew McPherson have brought this together in the journal article 'On Mediating Space, Sound and Experience: Interviews with situated sound art practitioners' in Organized Sound journal. Their study has identified artists as mediators, 'transfer[ing] their own situated and embodied listening to that of the audience and develop[ing] sonic and staging devices to direct perceptual activity and listening attention' (p1). Plus findings that '(2) the audience has an active relationship to the work; (3) the artwork shapes behaviour and perceptual experience; and (4) [the] engagement challenges.' (p3). This is a really nice study of the formation of situated / site-specific sound artworks. It has also been a nice opportunity to reflect on my own practice and research since Feb 2020, of how my 'site' of the body has expanded to include other people's bodies, interweaving an 'audience' as participant even more so. Have a read of the paper online here, or email me for a copy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/organised-sound/article/abs/on-mediating-space-sound-and-experience-interviews-with-situated-sound-art-practitioners/4616FE17A193E086E9EF53B54F888589   Our new sound work 'Open Wave-Receiver' premiers on Radiophrenia at 7pm on Feb 20th. Listen online here
en Wav ‘Open Wave-Receiver’ is an audio how-to guide from Shortwave Collective. In this piece, we share instructions on how to construct self-powered radio receivers, from the print version of our forthcoming 'how-to-guide' for Make Magazine. The work collages sounds of our collective, engaged in the processes of making and listening (including recordings made during a residency at Buinho Creative Hub, Portugal), as well as the sounds of our materials, our experimentation and workshopping, and finally, the signals received by the Open Wave-Receivers. Read more about the development of the Open Wave-Receiver here, and the Shortwave Collective here. Hugely honored to have this amazing line up of guest speakers presenting at our event - sharing their experiences of curating / directing urban sound art festivals and projects around the world:
Join us, online 6 October, 3-6pm BST, Online: www.crisap.org/research/projects/sound-art-and-urban-spaces/  The exhibition has been extended!! On now until Jan 31st 2022.
Head down to Finsbury park to experience the Peoples Park Plinth exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery. Three site responsive mobile artworks are live now till Jan 31st 2022. Just take your mobile phone and a set of headphones and head to the gallery in the centre of the park and to check out our work, 'We are just animals, humans and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds', by Hannah Kemp-Welch and I. Peoples Park Plinth: www.furtherfield.org/peoples-park-plinth-2021/ Image © Hydar Dewachi  What an incredible week learning about, un-learning about, making radios and expanded radios in all kinds of ways. There were found materials, unexpected sounds, antenna games up in the air, all conducted out in a lovely village in southern Portugal (and online) with the Shortwave Collective (in hybrid mode). Big thanks to Buinho Creative hub for having us. What began as a "foxhole radio residency" became an "open wave-receiver" residency as we made our own variations on what a simple radio receiver could be, and re-positioned the device we were working with as listening devices / microphones of sorts listening in to the wider radio field and electromagnetic sphere all around us. We've written up our experiences in a How-to article being published in Make Magazine early next year, and an audio version will be premiered on Radiophrenia. More soon. We also left an Open wave-receiver built into the Buinho Creative Hub roof, ready for listeners. Here are a few pics from our making week. Sound coming soon. Why are we testing radios by night? To listen at the 'grey line' transmission, when radio is much stronger at dawn and dusk. And wow was it! And the below is Messejana life. Pomegranates, chickens, 360 sunsets, roads that lead to the sky, amazing doorways and washing lines that do more than dry clothes. Looking forward to going back next year :) We ended the residency on a high, with a morning workshop making experimental radios, all of which worked and picked up the transmissions available at that time. Pics coming in the Make Magazine article showcasing each hand made radio.
Huge thanks to Francesca Oldfield for shooting this video of our mobile app work 'We are just animals, humans and machines getting on together in specific lifeworlds' by Hannah Kemp-Welch and I. If you cannot make it down to Finsbury park to visit the work in situ, this is the video for you :)  What an incredible summer it has been..... learning more and more about air pollution, co-writing a futuristic sonic narrative, developing sonifications in pure data, developing new air pollution visualisations, launching a new work that brings this all together and cycling around Middlesbrough with Kaffe :)
We took a bit of time to reflect on the journey in these blog posts on the BRI website, sharing sonification approaches and mobile air pollution findings and frustrations:
Read more about the work 'No scent or colour' about the Enviro Bikes and how they work and to get a copy of the air pollution data we've been gathering.  Very excited to announce our new artwork, a collaboration between Hannah Kemp-Welch and I, commissioned by RCA's curatorial collective Breath Mark and Furtherfield Gallery. Live in May & August 2021.
Full details here Just spotted that our Environmental Bike Lab at Lisboa Soa festival got featured in Neural Magazine! Have a read below about our air pollution sensing exploits around Lisbon.  Huge thanks to Iris Garrelfs for this brilliant review of Acts of Air exhibition in Sound Studies. 'Overall, Acts of Air invites an engagement with different urban conditions across several countries, through the lens of sound. Some of the scenarios encapsulated in the scores can be experienced directly, others are surveyed from afar, accessed through our imagination. Collectively, they allow us to consider similarities and differences across urban locations affected by varying material and cultural circumstances. The exhibition is successful in allowing for different kinds and degrees of participation by adopting a range of responsive strategies such as “re-voicing, re-hearing and re-sounding”, intended to reconfigure the urban sonic.' I really enjoyed Iris' reflection that the impact of these artworks was one of 'imaginably inhabiting [urban life] a little more boldly' and that this is a 'step towards reshaping our urban environment', one that we are in charge of. The full article is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20551940.2021.1879500?needAccess=true And link to the exhibition: http://acts-of-air.crisap.org/  |
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