Is a project is a project developed and presented at ISEA2009 in and around the port of Belfast, Northern Ireland, by prolific Australian Sound-Installation-Interaction artist Nigel Helyer, Tapio Mäkelä (FI), Nigel Helyer (AU) & Andreas Siagian (ID), in collaboration with the AudioNomad software team, Daniel Woo (AU), and Michael Lake (AU). The project is the last in a series of projects that developed out of the Sonic Landscapes project begun in 1999 in partnership with the commercial audio processing company Lake and with the SNAP (Satellite Navigation and Positioning) lab at the University of New South Wales. This iteration, subtitled Littoral Lives, is the most recent of works using the Audio Nomad system developed in a partnership with the school of Computer Science and Engineering, the SNAP lab, the HCI Lab at the University of New South Wales (Daniel Woo is the principal developer and technical collaborator on this series of Helyer projects).
Eco Located began with a maiden collaborative residency aboard the MARIN (Media Art Research Interdiciplinary Network) catamaran.
The project took water quality and meteorological readings, geotagged information, made field recordings, and recorded interviews with scientists and the community in and around Belfast Port and during their voyage across the North Sea- concentrating on the ‘Littoral cultures’ – the cultures that develop at the transition or boundaries of (in this case) land and sea.
The information gathered becomes the basis for an immersive surround sound installation that uses the Audio Nomad system to allow a user to enter and navigate an abstract soundscape – a kind of sonic topology constituted of and juxtaposing (sonifying) the information and media recorded during the vessel’s progress across the North Sea.
The Eco-Located project continues a common theme in Helyer’s work that explores the potential for audio to make audible that which be forgotten or unseen – this extends beyond the post modern desire to reveal an underlying or marginalised structure and to explore the way we might use audio in both new and old technology to realise new networks of relation and remembering between individuals, the communities of which they are part,their ecology, and their histories.