Critical Sound Objects for Collaboration
Update: An iteration of this project was shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (SoundScene) in Washington DC. Sound Scene Schedule.
Sound playground is a meditative public installation where people, alone or collectively, can focus on tactile sensations and create sounds with an opaque, autonomous ecosystem by observing and discovering its properties.
The work allows for play, humor, discussion, and co-producing sounds with other humans as well as with a group of semi-autonomous anti-instruments – feral technologies - that can be collaborated with but not fully known.
Some objects in the troupe only appear to work from 5 to 8 pm, others only in November. Sonic behavior evolves over time and objects decide how they respond to human input (touch, sound, proximity).
It is an opportunity to be with technology that requires respect of its opaque behavior and that respects our opacity in return. Neither party is expected to be fully knowable in order for playful collaboration - creation of sounds - to happen. Can lingering with reflexive nonhuman collaborators be an exercise for decentralizing the human and expanding the social imagination?
Conflating objecthood and personhood, the project aims to create an environment where people can practice collaborating with a heightened awareness of the agency and opacity of human and nonhuman others, reflecting on our horizontal interdependence with one another.
“The Anthropocene... calls for novel approaches to social dynamics. When nature and culture can no longer be studied as exclusively human, nonhuman or machine, how might we approach this puzzle?”
“The point here is not merely to use non/humans as tools to think with, but in thinking with them to face our ethical obligations to them, for they are not merely tools for our use but real living beings (and I include in this category ‘inanimate’ as well as ‘animate’ beings).”
Sound Playground performed by groups at The Waiting Room exhibit. The picnic-style blanket invited participants to engage alone and collectively in sound making with the semi-autonomous anti-instruments, sound playground characters. In this way the humans entered into an ecosystem they could not fully control but could collaborate with by listening and responding. Photo credit Gilad Dor.
Some objects have the Arduino Bluefruit with Bluetooth communication and some are wired. Both setups send serial to MaxMSP.
In Short:
Sound Playground is a tactile, semi-autonomous ecosystem of objects that emit sound to communicate with one another when they want to but that you can also collaborate with by triggering some of their sonic behaviors.
Sound Playground is a collection of networked tactile critical sound objects meant to serve as reflective instruments for groups to think with and examine our relationship to the sociotechnical systems that move us and in which we are complicit. One such object for example only works from 5-8 pm and another only in November. Critical but light, I nod towards models of alternative rules and hope to create opportunities for dialogue around our social agreements.
The picnic-style blanket invites participants to engage alone and collectively in sound making with the semi-autonomous anti-instruments, sound playground characters. In this way the humans enter into an ecosystem they could not fully control but can collaborate with by listening and responding. All the while, the sound objects remain independent actors of the experience.
Research question:
This experiment aims to examine the effects of such encounters. What happens when we consciously interact with ecosystems that are partially opaque to us? Can we be comfortable with unknowability both human and nonhuman? The project invites people to practice lingering with and collaborating with nonhumans whom they cannot fully understand and control, challenging the notion that the world is a rational, fully knowable place that can be controlled by humans
Can a workshop for human-nonhuman cooperation be an exercise for expanding or invigorating the social imagination?
Inspired by Ultra-Red’s sound objects for cultural analysis and action, improvisational practices of sound artists and musicians, Caroline Woolard’s tactile objects for the Center for Group Work and projects in the solidarity economy for artists, Pauline Oliveros’ collective vocal Deep Listening exercises, Éduard Glissant’s concept of the “right to opacity”, Jane Bennet’s human-nonhuman assemblages, Moten and Harney’s “undercommoning” as refusal, Bread Symphony: A Cross-Species Collaboration for Material and Spiritual Nourishment, Félix Guattari’s ideas on transversality, the Touch Tour for people with low vision, this motley and evolving work sits somewhere between a reflexive group jam session and a workshop that facilitates conversations about collaboration in various forms (with an emphasis on collectivism and the political economy of the art world) and the technologies used for such practices. It also poses questions about how we relate to nonhuman systems we “collaborate with”, about how much control we are used to enacting on such systems and how much those systems “see”/help/control us.
More about Sonic Playground:
The sound playground’s sonic behavior changes over time and cannot be predicted with certainty.
Due to the ever-shifting behaviors of this troupe of anti-instruments the human participants are gently decentralized.
The sound playground encourages deep listening, meditation, play, exploration, and the relinquishing of complete control on the part of the human.
Due to the ever-shifting behaviors of this troupe of anti-instruments the human participants cannot learn them but may be able to notice patterns as they get to know the personality of each sound object and as they observe the socialites that these objects form with one another. They can impress some of their sounds and interactions onto the playground’s memory, shaping some of its current and future behaviors. It is a sort of human-nohuman collaboration.
The sound playground is a self-reflexive instrument.
Some of the characters generate new sonic compositions by using bits of environmental sound, mixing it up with past recorded sounds, and playing the mashup back.
“Legibility becomes a condition of manipulation.”
James C. Scott
“Fugitivity is not only escape, “exit” as Paolo Virno might put it, or “exodus” in the terms of-fered by Hardt and Negri, fugitivity is being separate from settling. It is a being in motion that has learned that …there are spaces and modalities that exist separate from the logical, logistical, the housed and the positioned. “
Judith Halberstam in the introduction to The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
Early prototypes and current iterations.
This is a video of me moving one of the sound objects (without it's’ paper pulp shell). The accelerometer/gyroscope sensor is picking up the tilt, sending the data through serial to MaxMSP, where various sonic behaviors are set off. Some variation happens due to the object being programmed to have options as to how to respond and with which sounds, but for the most part the semi-autonomous object can be collaborated with.
I am moving away from a geometry for now and more towards organic earthy aesthetics but this was an early prototype of mapping movement to sound using an accelerometer and JavaScript (P5 js in the P5 js browser on a smart phone). Here you can see it without the shell : https://vimeo.com/527104416
One of my first prototypes for playtesting. I used a granular synthesis composition I made to create an experience where the sound plays and becomes louder or fainter depending on the proximity of the objects to one another. A light sensor would be used for this. This particular instrument is complex to make (trying out various light proximity sensors) so it is still in progress.
Themes explored
Sound Playground explores several themes. Opacity, object agency, refusal, tactility and sound, therapeutic play, abstracted anthropomorphism, and awkwardness of form.
Opaqueness and the negation of transparency
Can we sit with opaque ecosystems and be comfortable with unknowability both human and nonhuman? Can we entertain a more complex view of the world than the dominant narrative that puts forth the idea that the world is a rational, fully knowable place that can be reduced to numbers and controlled? What actions - or inactions - would constitute a politics of refusal to slow down increasingly troubling socioeconomic, political, and environmental conditions?
The playground invites people to linger with and examine how they relate to human and non-human ecosystems that they will never be able to fully learn.
Refusal
Sound Playground, through its generative autonomous nature (agency to record and play sound when they want, unpredictability or “uselessness” to the human) and specific relationship to time (some of these objects only work from 5- 8 pm, others only in the month of November) critiques existing forms of labor and offers some bold alternatives
Object agency and anthropomorphism
Object agency and anthropomorphism serves to decentralize the human in these playful interactions. In Nature’s Queer Performativity, Karen Barad encourages thinking with nonhumans and paying close attention to them - even objects - as a way to tread carefully on a shared planet.
“...The point here is not merely to use non/humans as tools to think with, but in thinking with them to face our ethical obligations to them, for they are not merely tools for our use but real living beings (and I include in this category “inanimate”as well as “animate” beings). A related point is to avoid the pitfall of positioning everything in relation to the human and to embrace a commitment to being attentive to the activity of each critter in its ongoing intra-active engagement with and as part of the world it participates in materializing.”
Temporality, Unpredictability, and Play
In addition to play, I am examining the human interactions with things that they cannot control or learn as well as change over time. The objects absorb bits of the surrounding noise and insert these bits into the existing algorithmic composition, somewhat like new snippets of DNA. An object's program also changes in response to how it was moved. The experiences of an object is incorporated into its future behavior, but it changes alongside us using its own logic. The interactions invite users to examine what it means to them to be in control, especially in control of creation. Can we accept this degree of independence from our interlocutors and be at ease with it?
.
Awkwardness of Form
The shapes of the objects often lean or appear to be in mid-fall. The intention is perhaps to convey some energy and vulnerability, which, I think help to anthropomorphize some of these objects.
Preparing for Unfolding Realities exhibition in Brooklyn. May 2019.
Fabrication and materials
Fabrication included creating enclosures out of home-made paper clay from shredded documents and egg crates. The object that actually looks more like an egg crate (below) was modeled in Vectorwoks and 3-d printed.
The objects to date are all prototypes though some are higher fidelity than others.
The skins/enclosures must be durable because they are often held and moved. They can be made of various materials and varied textures are encouraged - therapeutic tactile objects have been used to help with mindfulness training.
I used mainly paper pulp made of egg cartons and shredded recycled paper. In the past I have used wooden enclosures and 3d printed ones. My next iterations will likely be higher fidelity paper. However, I am also interested in ceramics for ease of cleaning and aesthetics, in certain metal for their antiseptic qualities, and in textiles for variations on tactile sensations. I am leaning towards organic-looking material in order to elicit the feeling of aliveness and mystery. Materials like wood and metal are associated with industrial or commodity goods. I plan on experimenting with growing enclosures out of mycelium though paper pulp seems to produce similar effects.
The objects moving forward will be covered with a protective wax or organic resin for ease of sanitation The pandemic has brought up limitations on materials. Gloves will be required to handle these objects while in a pandemic and possibly even after.
The innards: Arduinos, sensors, and contraptions to hold everything together inside the enclosure.
