Listening Into the Lattice
(2024)
author(s): Jorge Boehringer
published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
This exposition details the opening phase of new research between an experimental sound artist and an archaeologist, with a detailed examination of critical epistemological questions that have arisen from the beginning of this project. Both collaborating researchers are situated within hybrid specialisations. As the project unfolds, archaeo-chemical data is explored and animated through methods developed from intersections of data science and musical practice, resulting in performance and installation environments in which knowledge of material culture of the ancient past may be made present through listening. However, beyond a case study, this exposition points to how interdisciplinary artistic work produces results that have value outside of normative paradigms for any of the fields from which it is derived, while offering critical insight about those fields. This exposition is formed of these insights. Readers are introduced to the structure of the data, its relationship to the materiality of the artefacts described, the technological apparatus and compositional methodology through which the data is sonified, and the new materiality of the resulting artistic experiences.
Sonification exists at a nexus of sound production and listening, interwoven with information. Meaning and interpretations arise from artistic decisions concerning sound composition and the context for listening to take place. Meanwhile, listening teaches us about data and about the physical and cultural spaces into which we project it. In this way, sonification is always already interdisciplinary.
Sounding the futures imaginary: A collaborative intra-modal storying methodology
(2023)
author(s): Rachel Horst, Kedrick James, Yuya Takeda, Esteban Morales, Effiam Yung
published in: Research Catalogue
The pandemic is not one coherent narrative but an unbounded multiplicity of narrative ravellings. One theme that can be traced through the course of the past two years is the undoings and redoings of normalcy, including normalcy in qualitative research. Our digital literacy research group took up the pandemic as a canvas upon which to story new futurities and possibilities for qualitative research in physical separation within the context of slow-moving upheaval. At the outset of the first physical lockdown in March of 2020, we began a collaborative and multimodal futures fictioning practice, storying new communicative possibilities and potentialities. Over the course of fourteen months, we reached into each other’s imagination, isolation, temporality, and physical environment via story and sound. This exposition charts our diffractive fictioning methodology, in which we collectively map communicative practices and collaborative meaning in virtual spaces in a time when coherence and consensus have become radically fractured. A cyborg skunk moves through this assemblage of poetry, sonification, narrative, performance, theory, and silence, flicking its many imagined tales and nudging its noses at the wreckage of the normal in search of difference.
Exploring North Nordic Landscapes in a ‘Hyper-constructive’ Fashion
(2022)
author(s): Marinos Koutsomichalis
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
This exposition details an experimental art/research endeavour pivoting on an improvised exploration of the broader North Nordic region. It accounts for a hybrid, maximalist, and materialist performance practice that draws on an unconditionally eclectic exploration of a particular geographic region and of certain (non)human related activities and mobilities encountered therein. The endeavour is contextualised with respect to trains of thought and empirical research methods in experimental arts, object oriented ontology, non-representational theory, techno-scientific culture, post-humanism, and improvised ethnography. It is shown to concern, inter alia, on-location audio/video recording, DIY making, (found) physical artefacts, interviews, data displays, prose, cooking, knitting, and landscape cinematography/photography. The particular methods at play are detailed and theoretical ramifications are outlined. It is accordingly claimed that a structural, procedural, and sensory hybridity of sorts may bring forth original and genuinely exploratory artistic manifestations that contribute (non quantifiable, nor discursive) ways of knowing the North Nordic region under scrutiny; ones that lie at the crux wherein poetic, enactive, epistemic and speculative tactics meet, mingle, and intertwine. This exposition also features an extensive pool of audiovisual material to aid detail the method and to support this claim.
Animas: Disaster, Data, and the Resonance of a River
(2019)
author(s): Brian House
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this paper, I discuss the conceptual framework and development of Animas, an artwork which links sounding materials to the Animas River in Colorado. The Animas River is heavily contaminated by leakage from abandoned gold mines, including a 2015 spill in which three million gallons of wastewater were accidentally released into the river by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), turning the water a bright orange and threatening agriculture, tourism, and an already “disturbed” alpine ecology. Animas draws on precedents in sound art and explores transduction as a means of relating to more-than-human agencies and avoiding over-simplified representations of environmental degradation. Changes in the clarity of the water, invisible indicators of the dissolved metals within it, and the dynamics of its daily and seasonal flows all become sound in the gallery, producing timbral "color" from the river's continually changing composition—these data are provided by the Southern Ute Water Quality Program and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The piece acknowledges how our limited temporal sensibilities are challenged by the imbrication of the geologic time of minerals, the historical time of extractive industries, and the immediate urgency of equitable responses to ecological change.
Addressing the Mapping Problem in Sonic Information Design through Embodied Image Schemata, Conceptual Metaphors, and Conceptual Blending
(2019)
author(s): Stephen Roddy
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article explores the mapping problem in parameter mapping sonification: the problem of how to map data to sound in a way that conveys meaning to the listener. We contend that this problem can be addressed by considering the implied conceptual framing of data–to–sound mapping strategies with a particular focus on how such frameworks may be informed by embodied cognition research and theories of conceptual metaphor. To this end, we discuss two examples of data-driven musical pieces which are informed by models from embodied cognition, followed by a more detailed case study of a sonic information design mapping strategy for a large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) network.
Sonic Information Design for the Display of Proteomic Data
(2018)
author(s): William L. Martens
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
A research project focusing on the sonification of proteomic data distributions provided the context for the current study of sonic information design, which was guided by multiple criteria emphasizing practical use as well as aesthetics. For this case, the auditory display of those sonifications would be judged useful if they were to enable listeners to hear differences in proteomic data associated with three different types of cells, one of which exhibited the neuropathology associated with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
A primary concern was to ensure that meaningful patterns in the data would not be lost as the data were transformed into sound, and so three different data sonifications were designed, each of which attempted to capitalize upon human auditory capacities that complement the visual capacities engaged by more conventional graphic representations. One of the data sonifications was based upon the hypothesis that auditory sensitivity to regularities and irregularities in spatio-temporal patterns in the data could be heard through spatial distribution of sonic components. The design of a second sonification was based upon the hypothesis that variation in timbre of non-spatialized components might create a distinguishable sound for each of three types of cells. A third sonification was based upon the hypothesis that redundant variation in both timbral and spatial features of sonic components would be even more powerful as a means for identifying spatio-temporal patterns in the dynamic, multidimensional data generated in modern proteomic studies of ALS. This paper will focus upon the sound processing underlying the alternative sonifications that were examined in this case study of sonic information design.
Extra-musical Systems in Music: their implementation in contemporary music in the context of multimedia
(2016)
author(s): Andrius Arutiunian
published in: KC Research Portal
The purpose of this research is to define methods of applying extra-musical and data-based systems in multimedia music works. The first part of the paper concentrates on the outline of the motivation and reasoning for using extra-musical systems from a composer's or sound artist's perspective and gives a historical precedent context. Parallels are drawn together with contemporary art and art critique examples. The second part of the research outlines the possible modes of the data-based systems application by analysing multiple multimedia works by composers or sound artists written in the last two decades including a piece by the author of the paper. The types of multimedia and its connection to sound are discussed, the conceptual deconstruction and its semiotic implications of the data used are analysed. The given conceptual and semantic context is applied for analysing the musical parameters and data's usage in sound control. Each of the pieces discussed outlines a particular mode of the conceptuality towards the extra-musical system usage and functions as a primal device for further conclusions drawn. The final part of the research consists of the general overview of the conclusions drawn and attempts to establish a general outline of the motivation and the resulting outcome behind the usage of the extra-musical systems in multimedia works.
Rediscovering the Interpersonal: Models of Networked Communication in New Media Performance
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Alicia Champlin
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This paper examines the themes of human perception and participation within the contemporary paradigm and relates the hallmarks of the major paradigm shift which occurred in the mid-20th century from a structural view of the world to a systems view. In this context, the author’s creative practice is described, outlining a methodology for working with the communication networks and interpersonal feedback loops that help to define our relationships to each other and to media since that paradigm shift. This research is framed within a larger field of inquiry into the impact of contemporary New Media Art as we experience it.
This thesis proposes generative/cybernetic/systems art as the most appropriate media to model the processes of cultural identity production and networked communication. It reviews brief definitions of the systems paradigm and some key principles of cybernetic theory, with emphasis on generative, indeterminate processes. These definitions provide context for a brief review of precedents for the use of these models in the arts, (especially in process art, experimental video, interactive art, algorithmic composition, and sound art) since the mid-20th century, in direct correlation to the paradigm shift into systems thinking.
Research outcomes reported here describe a recent body of generative art performances that have evolved from this intermedial, research-based creative practice, and discuss its use of algorithms, electronic media, and performance to provide audiences with access to an intuitive model of the interpersonal in a networked world.