This weekend I experienced two very different works of ‘media’ art united by the fact that writing about them will not only and undoubtedly fail to provide an adequate account but also perhaps undermine their value for the reader’s future experience.

You have been warned.

While I’m here interested in the first of these works, Duncan Speakman’s subtlemob piece As If It Were the Last Time, its relation to the second – James Turrell’s newest Skyspace installation at the National Gallery of Australia, is intriguing. Both are works of experience design. This is not experience design in the sense that we are now seeing as pervasive media tech finds it way into retail spaces and public institutions. This is experience design in the sense that both works are designed for a kind of quiet transformation of the way the viewer perceives the world and our place in it.

Quiet - is key here. Neither of these works are interested in mediation or expression. Even the term modulation seems to indicate a degree of intermediation that simply doesn’t apply. At the least the term ‘modulation’ comes close to the sense of a kind of phase shift in perception that provides for \a new synthesis between bodies and between bodies and their environment.

Turrell’s Skyspace installation is a large scale architectural work in the South Garden of the National Gallery of Australia. The work recalls spaces of contemplation or worship. The Skyspace architecture plays with the perception of space and of natural light. It makes the ‘fabric’ of perception tangible from the scale and frame of the body and its movements through to scale and frame of planet and universe and their movements. There is nothing to say as you leave Turrell’s Skyspace – no interpretation to share, no reading to offer, but something like a necessarily and refreshingly unspoken quietude.

Beyond Flash Mobs.

Speakman’s Subtlemob concept similarly modulates the scale and frame of perception in the service of realising a resonant intensity between bodies.

Subtlemob is based on the concept of flash mobbing. Flash mobbing is a mode of collective performance based on the potential for contemporary technology (mobile phones, internet) to organise a spontaneous collection of anonymous individuals to gather in a public space at a designated time and perform a particular act (normally inane or bizarre).

The invention of Flash mobbing is claimed by Bill Wasik in his excellent account published in Harper’s Bazaar in 2006 (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963). In that account Wasik describes the project as essentially self parodying the willingness of its participants to act in transgression of norms only within the unanimity of a group. For Wasik the Flash Mob was a performative critique of ‘hipster’ culture based on the production of an event that was its own sufficient reason.

The Flash Mob concept realised a number of variations and innovations. For the most part the increasing ubiquity of Flash mobs saw them become as mundane as they were inane. The most interesting of flash mobs became more determinedly performative – less based on the spontaneous experience of the mob and more on a deliberate and organised performance. In many cases the presence of as many video cameras recording proceedings as participants begged the question as to who the mob was performing – they appeared like an obstinant child acting-out in front of a mirror. This desire to record Flash Mob culminated in a series of performances the execution and filming of which is so elaborately staged

By 2006 the ubiquity of the iPod added another dimension to the potential of Flash Mobs allowing for ‘Silent Disco’s’ -where participants downloaded a playlist to be played on headphones as they gathered at a predetermined and network-shared (public) space and time. The ‘Silent Disco’ realises the potential of audio to produce a locative, augmented, and social media form without the need for anything but the simplest of consumer media technologies. Its also sees the flash mob move back away from the cynical critique of Wisak and from the pretense of performance. In the process, it hints at a less irony laden experience, an experience more concerned with the implication of a social intensity via the production of shared ‘spontaneous’ experience.

Speakman’s Subtlemob.

Speakman’s subtlemob ‘instance’ As if it Were the Last Time’ extends and capitalises on these later developments. The potential participant is alerted to an immanent subtlemob event by a Facebook group, Email list or via Twitter only days before the event is scheduled. The location of the event is posted the morning prior. For ‘As if it were the last time’ The participant is instructed to download one of two 30 minute audio files based on their birthdate. Each participant is to bring a partner each with their own mp3 player and set of headphones. The content of As if it Were the Last Time seemed heavily biased to a romantic couple- although this wasn’t mentioned explicitly. I’m glad I was their with my wife – rather than a friend – which would have been awkward. The participants amass in the designated space and play the file at the designated time.

Unlike the flash mob -the aim of subtlemob is to remain subtle throughout the event – to not draw undue attention yourself and to follow the instructions delivered in the audio file. Instructions prior to the event explicitly ask participants not to bring video cameras or recording devices. The aim is to be completely absorbed in the moment rather than to be performing for latter recollection or replay. The value of the subtlemob is in the experience itself not in the expressive performance of its participants. Experience of the work is rather akin to being immersed in a cinematic work that has come to life and absorbed the viewers as its protagonists.

As stated, the work consists of two audio files so that roughly half the participants are listening to each file (couples listen to the same file). The files are well produced from an audio perspective with beautifully edited and composed music and professional voice over and minimal (but very effective) additional sound design.

In Experience.

The content of the audio is elusive and ethereal – with snaps of instruction interspersed with near-narrative insights projected onto the people and the space you inhabit. Although these snaps of insight and reflection are very general they become more specific and contextual due to the fact that the actions of the other subtlemob participants fall roughly in sync and are interspersed with the unaware public as they too move through the space.

The content of As If It Were the Last Time isn’t tailored to the space as in an audio tour – its composed to compel your reflection on the space and your place within it, your relation to your partner, and to the other couples, and passers-by that inhabit the space. As participants lean on each other, or look at their reflections, or gaze up at the buildings, or as other people pass by, the narrator will ask you to reflect on what they are thinking and feeling, what possible past, or potential future they each embody in that instance.

The resulting experience is transcendent and dreamlike. I am not usually well-disposed to public performance but in this case it rarely felt like I was performing. I never felt self-conscious during the piece but rather deeply engaged by the work and by the interaction it encouraged with my partner and the space. Like Turrell’s Skypasce installation As If It Were the Last Time never becomes about the content itself, there is no story to take away form the experience other than those that you bring to the space and are invoked by the work. There is no message, only the intense modulation of the relation between bodies and between body and space.

Sydney’s subtlemob was on a friday evening at 6pm in the middle of Martin Place (the middle of post-colonial Sydney). There were 35 couples participating. There is much to be said about the concept of the subtlemob and Speakman’s execution of the concept in the form of As if It Were The Last Time. None of that discussion is really about the experience of the work – beyond the fact that it demonstrates a entirely new form of media art and experience in the use of audio as the basis for truly creative, social, and technically unencumbered augmented reality.

Beyond that -you really needed to be there.

The subtlemob project and the development of As If It Were the Last Time is a project supported by the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (Who have also supported the amazing Anti-VJ).

The Thinkbox collective is based in and around Windsor, Ontario – across the river and border from Detroit – with all of its attendent musical history. The Detroit  based www.metrotimes.com predictably places Thinkbox in the context of Techno’s genesis, development and bifurcation as moving the techno/electronic aesthetic betond the club dance floors to the gallery and museum space.

Given the timing however (2003-2008) it would seem more likely that Thinkbox were rather more influenced by the increasingly ubiquity of (largely eurpoean) post glitch ambient electronica of the form popularised by the likes of Christopher Fennesz or the ‘Artic Ambience’ of Biosphere. That claim appears reinforced by the individual releases of Christopher Bissonnette one of the founding members of the collective.A sound and graphic designer, Bissonnette use of the guitar and field recordings recalls both Fennesz and perhaps Oren Ambarchi and fellow Canadian (Vancouver) Loscil. Other members of the collective include Mark Laliberte (http://www.marklaliberte.com/index2.html) - an independent curator , ‘project-based’ artist and experimental poet – who also performs ambient soundscape/design work – his Pillow Scenes Soundworks marked the first and only CD release for the collective. Mark has been heavily involved with the Zine culture and currently produces the design/pictorial magazine Carousel (http://www.carouselmagazine.ca/) while exhibiting a wide range of intermedia and installation works that are united by the kind of countercultural cool that belies their zine-culture influences. Chris McNamara is a Windsor based video artist who teaches new media at the University of Michigan. Chris also works with collaborator Dermot Wilson under the name Machydem Inc. – mostly producing film and digital video projects.  Steve Roy, Rob Theakston – an  electronic music producer working a similar vein to that of Bissonette -with a slightly more dissonant edge- and Bill van Loo –  an electronic music producer who also works with guitar to produce live ambient electronica (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGgsCV7gh88).

Daniel Woo is  also associated with the iCinema project at UNSW a large scale hemispherical ‘cave’ style immersive environment although his work tends to focus of speech and natural languages and interface design and usability research.

Woo was central in establishing a HCI education at UNSW and is considered a leader in the field of HCI education and research. He has published widely on interface design, formal usability testing, speech synthesis and interface, spatial audio interfaces amongst other research interests.

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.

Run Silent, Run Deep is the 2008 Singapore Iteration of the series and involved a mapping of the Marine environment of Singapore harbour onto an immersive and interactive sonic topology that the user can explore via a projected visual interface.

The Audio Nomad project involves the representation of geo-tagged, recorded, media including images, video, sound, juxtaposed with the sonification of geo-spatial information. This reconstitution of this collected data in a sonic topology allows a user to navigate a soundscape in which recorded histories, unseen ecological dynamics, and visceral field recordings are evocatively juxtaposed to reveal otherwise forgotten, marginalised, or assumed networks of relation.

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.

Hellyer’s Wireless House project aims to reclaim, or rather ‘resound’ the structure. In the process the Wireless House project reclaims the potential for sound to produce a communal space within the park as public space. There is an intriguing differential evoked here  between the communal and the public.

The installation reacts to people who approach the structure calling on a substantial archive of audio, in part contributed by the National Sound and Music Archives and supplemented by an open call for local citizens to record their own recollections of Glebe’s past. This audio recollections are played back at a level that invites engagement without disturbing the park.

In an interesting twist the Wireless House becomes more than simply a memorial to a media passed. Equipped with an Unwired wireless internet node the site also becomes Sydney’s first (official) free outdoor hotspot. The wireless of today and the forms of sociality, communality, interaction into which it folds begs comparison to yesterdays community gathered around the radio transmitter.

The Wireless House project is supported by the City of Sydney Council and Unwired.

He developed and administers runme.org, an online repository for software art, which has given rise to works like dot_matrix_synth, where a dot matrix printer is reprogrammed to play music while it prints its own notations in patterns as it is performed. He forms part of slub, a trio of coders who develop their own software for the creation and performance of process-based improvisations and live generative music. In the same vein, he is also a member of TOPLAP, a group of highly improvisatory programmers who write software while it is being executed to generate music and live visuals during a performance.

She has performed audio/visual work with artists like Chris Caines, Shannon O’Neill and Ben Byrne. She has curated collaborative performance events like Semaphore and is also Co-Director of the Firstdraft Gallery.

NRPA was founded in 1981 with the purpose of supporting and developing radio art, a cultural movement encompassing experimental sound-based practices conceived to operate within the specific parameters associated with broadcast radio. The organization was considered to lie at the international forefront of radio art distribution between 1987 and 1998, during which over 300 works for public radio were commissioned and disseminated via the weekly program series New American Radio.

Taking heed of significant cultural shifts resulting from the expansion and proliferation of wireless and digital modes of communication, the NRPA extended its mandate in 1996 to support the then burgeoning practice of net art by launching Turbulence. The project and its associated website currently remains dedicated to commissioning and exhibiting the work of artists who either use existing applications and technologies or develop new ones to create innovative, hybrid or networked art forms that use the Internet as a primary medium. The organisation’s key channels for facilitating the creation and reception of new works are its Artists’ Studios, Guest Curator, Spotlight and Events programs. Importantly, the Turbulence website houses an online archive of over 160 projects commissioned by the body throughout its 13 year life.

Other NRPA supported projects affiliated with Turbulence include the Networked_Performance research blog (2004 -), a valuable resource that chronicles the wide range of issues and perspectives linked with various network-enabled practices, and the Networked_Music_Review blog (2007 -), which accommodates the present legacy of New American Radio by gathering data on projects, performances, composers, musicians and software tools related with emerging networked musical explorations made possible by computers, the Internet and mobile technologies.

Dorkbot is a worldwide movement characterised by regular open community meetings under the principles of open access, hacking, experimentation, making, community art practice, and collaboration. The Sydney chapter tends to be led by (but not limited to) art practitioners and characterised by an interests in installation, sound and projection experiments.

Cited from the Dorkbot Sydney website, Dorkbot aims:

‘To bring people together from different fields who are interested in doing strange things with electricity; be you artist, engineer, musician, electrician, software developer, hermit, whatever. Regular meetings pose as an opportunity for public discussion, peer review and exploration of ideas, experiments and finished works and also to solidify and invite growth, encouragement and collaboration in a community of curious people.’ Dorkbot Sydney is generally held the last TUESDAY of the month.. Dorkbot Sydney is a non-profit organization and so it is free to come and be a member of the audience or make a presentation although we welcome donations to help with the basic costs of running the event. ]]> http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/events/dorkbot-sydney/feed 0 -33.890418 151.2091862-33.890418151.2091862 http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/people/somay-langley http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/people/somay-langley#comments Fri, 28 Nov 2008 03:35:53 +0000 Xavier http://dynamicmedianetwork.org/?p=188 Somaya Langley is a sound and media artist and former co-director of Electrofringe festival. Her work has been presented and performed in festivals and conferences throughout Australia and internationally including the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), Transmediale.08, Tuned City, New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), das kleine field recordings festival, Liquid Architecture 6, the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Sound Lab Channel III, Electrofringe, the Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC), the Australasian Sound Recording Association (ASRA) Conference, the Totally Huge New Music Festival, the Melbourne Fringe Festival and Skylounge at the National Museum of Australia. In 2005 she completed commissions for Experimenta’s New Visions and the National Film and Sound Archive’s Ten Minutes of Passion, for which her piece Passion in the Protest also received a finalist’s award. Highlights over the past three years include surround-sound compositions for tele path, a trilogy of video works by media artist David McDowell, funded by artsACT and sound for the solo theatre work The Minutiae of Inertia, as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival. She also participated in the Performance Space’s Time_Place_Space 5 workshop, which was supported by an artsACT 2006 Travel Grant and participated in the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s Create_Space 2005 New Media Lab, which was supported by an ANAT workshop grant. In 2007, she attended the Australian Network for Art and Technology’s re:skin Media Laboratory that was supported by an ANAT workshop grant. Subsequently, she travelled overseas to attend the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in New York, the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) in Montreal plus a collaborative residency at STEIM in Amsterdam ,which was made possible by an Australia Council for the Arts Run_Way grant.

The Interactive Institute has a number of research groups within it such as Digital Cultural Heritage Centre which looks at issues such as cultural knowledge transfer in new media and technologies, The Design Research Centre which seems concerned with developing big-picture research strategies, Sound Studio and SoundSpace groups working in interactive sound design, NVISION working with visualisation techniques and Mobility Studio which looks at, well, developments in the use of mobile technologies.

The Mobile Life Centre at Stockholm University has a research focus that spans from social and entertainment and work aspects of mobile technologies, affective engagement and ubiquitous computing. Set up as a 10 year funding project by VINNOVA – (The Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems), which is a State authority that aims to ‘promote growth and prosperity throughout Sweden’ through funding ‘innovations linked to research and development’. The Centre names the Interactive Insitute and the Swedish Insitute of Computer Science as collaborative partners, and also list a number of industry partners including Sony Ericsson, Microsoft Research and Stockholm Innovation and Growth. The centre lists around 20 PhD students and Professorial staff on its list of researchers and lsome of the more interesting research projects include:

Mobile Eco-System

The future mobile eco-system – who pays for what? And what does it feel like? A future mobile service eco-system where we explore alternative universes for infrastructure, business models and the industry’s new role.

Embodied Affective Interaction

Interact emotionally with your whole body. New mobile and ubiquitous services in areas such as pervasive games, social, emotional and bodily communication and new mobile media.

There is also an interesting list of seminars on topics such as the following:
Beyond representations: Towards an action-centric perspective on tangible interaction

Mobile Collaborative Live Video Mixing

Affective Loops : research agenda for bodily persuasion through a design approach we name affective loops is outlined. Affective loop experiences draw upon physical, emotional interactions between user and system.

Whilst this begins to appear quite the complex web of tangled connections, it seems that one common link and hence potentially a good interview subject might be Professor Kristina Hook . She is Professor at Mobile Life, as well as Lab Manager at Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and Professor of Human-Machine Interaction at the Dept of Computer and Systems Science (a joint venture between Stockholm University and Royal Institute of Technology, Kristina Hook lists research projects in embodied interaction and ‘affective computing’ among her interests. Particularly notable is the research project which has involved Microsoft Research called Affective Diary, which investigates techniques data-mapping diary of galvanic skin response via mobile technologies, and seems to have spawned collaborative projects such as a sound design project which looks at sonification techniques using the data sets generated by Affective Diary.

Youtube video on Affective Diary with Kristina Hook

Watz discovered the computer at age 11 and immediately found his direction in life. At age 20 he defected from Computer Science studies to do graphics for raves, using his programming to create organic shapes in 2D and 3D. In parallel to creating his own work, Watz worked as a graphic designer for many years, probing the limits of design. In the years 2000-2002 he ran the studio Products of Play with Erik Johan Worsøe Eriksen before deciding to focus on his art practice.

In 2005 Watz started Generator.x, a platform for generative art and design which so far has resulted in a conference, a blog, a travelling exhibition and concert tour. The Generator.x conference took place at Atelier Nord in Oslo September 2005, while the Generator.x exhibition premiered at the Norwegian National Museum. The exhibition is currently touring until 2007. A concert tour of Norway with generative sound and visuals took place in April 2006, organized by the National Touring Concerts.

In 2005 Watz received an honorary mention for his project Universal Digest Machine. He had previously received a mention for Sense:less (Pendry / Mork / Stenslie / Watz) in 1996. In 2003 he premiered the public art commission Drawing Machine 1-12, a work that was shown for two years on the home page of the Norwegian Government and Ministries of State. In recent years he has created several animated works for projection on building facades such as Neon Organic, which is currently being projected on the Vattenfall headquarters in Berlin.

Watz currently lives in Berlin. His tools of choice are Java, Processing, VVVV and Flash. He continues to edit the Generator.x blog and prepare future Generator.x events, as well as teach workshops in computational design and generative art.

Marius Watz can be contacted at marius@unlekker.net