Nigel Helyer (aka Doctor Sonique) is a prolific Australian interactive and installation sound artist whose work explores and actively mines the intersections between science, art, culture, and technology. There are in excess of 60 projects listed on Helyer’s web site and most of these are indeed distinct and substantial projects in their own right. Only a few of the most relevant and recent are figured in this database.
Helyer’s work is what his website describes as ‘actively interdisciplinary’- linking creative expression, scientific research and technical development. More specifically Helyer’s work is characterised by an interest in the potential for technical architectures to reveal otherwise unseen or marginalised dynamics that span and interweave the development of culture, environment, history and technology .
Installation is the most common vehicle for Helyer’s work which tends to employ elements of computer and mechanical interaction as the basis for an establishing and exploring the visceral relation between body and ecology that it potentialises.
Helyer’s most recent work has developed out of a collaboration with the Satellite Navigation and Positioning Group and Human Computer Interaction Lab of the University of New South Wales (Most notably with Daniel Woo and Michael Lake of UNSW). That work is based on the Audio Nomad system that provides for the mapping of geo-tagged media and geospatial information in a interactive system that immerses the user in a sonified representation of the environment. That representation juxtaposes sonified meteorological and environmental data with recorded histories, cultural fragments, field recordings (both visual and sonic) making the relations between these ‘readings’ visceral. The user traverses this sonic topology produced via an immersive multiscreen and surround sound system and the unique Audio Nomad interface to explore the transitions and relations between the human, biological, and environmental systems.
The Audio Nomad system is the result of a project Helyer began in 1999 and which continued until 2001 called Sonic Landscapes and which employed the spatial audio systems developed by Lake Technology and the GPS systems developed by the SNAP lab of the University of New South Wales (and in collaboration with both Lake and UNSW). That project allowed for a fictive but nonetheless visceral 3D immersive soundscape to be accurately positioned and explored on/in a physical terrain. The subject and site for that work was the St Stephen’s Graveyard in Newtown, Sydney – a site rich with the kind of lost/invisible histories, that along with the invisible or marginalised dynamics of our ecology, constitute the other principle interest in Helyer’s work.
Two other interwoven streams are apparent in traversing Helyer’s catalogue. The first is an interest in oral and sonic histories that is expressed in the Wireless House (2009) and GhosTrain (2008) projects both of which work on resounding the forgotten histories that are expressed in the sonic markers of a superceded or evicted heavy industry that once constituted Sydney’s inner city life or the oral histories that recount the human cultures to which it gave rise.
The other stream of Helyer’s catalogue is the design of mechanical and dynamic sculptures that harness wind or other environmental (or differential forces-electromagnetic force for example) forces as a means of modal ‘transduction’ – of converting wind to dynamic form (Zephyr 2010), or electromagnetic potential into sound (Swarm 2005), audio to tactile vibration (Adrift-2009, Transformer 2005), kinaesthetic potential into sound and form (Spinner 2005).
Helyer’s work is extensively and generously documented on the Artist’s web site (http://www.sonicobjects.com/) and farexceeds this rather cursory account of his contribution to media art both nationally in Australia and and internationally – The rise of ubiquitous computing and cheap portable, and embeddable, systems of playback has seen sound art move to the forefront of media and interactive art – Helyer has become a central protagonist in this ongoing exploration.