Airea (E-Journal)
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Editorial: Revisiting interdisciplinarity within collaborative sonic practice
Full text linkOver the past two decades, collaboration has emerged as a keyword and an important methodological and ethical concern in various disciplines, which has nurtured interdisciplinary approaches that often encompass innovative processes of knowledge production. In sonic practice, trends such as participatory art, the workshop turn, and ideas of Do-It-With-Others contributed to the emergence of creative processes that manifest within the sphere of inter-human relations through participation and collaboration. Such processes can operate beyond the institutional space, or classic studio and gallery settings, by engaging directly with the social realm; blurring the lines between art, performance and our lived social, political, economic, technological and environmental realities. How are interdisciplinary practices, methodologies and vocabularies shaping the way sound and music works are created and experienced? How does this search for knowledge change sonic practice? The second issue of Airea Journal explores these questions by presenting practice-based and theoretical contributions of collaborative interdisciplinary creative processes in sound. This special focus on sound is addressed from multiple perspectives in relation to compositional, audiovisual, social, political, environmental, participatory and performative standpoints. This is a move that pays attention to and interrogates the aesthetics, methodologies and politics of interdisciplinary sonic practices. The sound arts often involve more than one disciplines and in order to study and comprehend them, an interdisciplinary approach is demanded. Many sound artworks are more than just (about) sound or sounds. Consequently, no single discipline is able to fully encompass how sound as affective and vibrant matter can be both reflexive and constitutive of social, cultural, political, religious, ethical, and perhaps even biological or cognitive developments. Sound can be investigated from almost any angle, and the articles in the present issue include numerous disciplines and subjects
Composer-composer collaboration and the difficulty of intradisciplinarity
Full text linkResearch and practice involving parties from different disciplines is of increasing importance in many fields. In the arts, this has manifested itself in both increasing attention on established collaborative partnerships – composers, for example, collaborating with writers, choreographers and directors – and a move towards more overtly cross-, multi-, inter- and/or trans-disciplinary forms of working – a composer working with a physicist, philosopher or psychologist. Composer-composer partnerships are far less common, meaning intradisciplinary collaboration is little explored in relation to practice research in music.
This article takes the collaborative music theatre composition I only know I am (2019) created by the authors – Litha Efthymiou and Martin Scheuregger – as a case study, outlining the issues and opportunities that arise through combining two compositional practices in an effort to create a single artistic output. Ways in which the composers managed this process are detailed in the context of communication, technology, and the issue of tacit knowledge (of both individual compositional process and the working of intradisciplinary collaboration). In particular, reflections on their experience during a week-long residency, in which they collaborated on a single musical work, is discussed in order to understand to what extent two aesthetic approaches can be reconciled to create work satisfactory to both parties.
Notions of composition as an inherently collaborative process are used to contextualise the means by which composer-composer collaborations might be understood. The authors reflect on an understanding of intradisciplinarity in the context of their practice as composers in order to draw conclusions that will allow them, and others, to approach composer-composer collaboration in an informed manner
Åčçëñtß: Notes on a Distributed Composition
Full text linkIn 2018 I was appointed to the position of Glasgow’s first UNESCO City of Music artist-in-residence. Over the course of a year I worked with numerous community groups and choirs across the city to collaboratively devise and realise a new choral/film work, titled Åčçëñtß, which was performed by an audience of over three hundred and fifty people at its premiere at the Glasgow Royal Concert Halls in 2019. Åčçëñtß explores accents as a sonorous social matter – staccatos and lilts, patterns of difference in our voices, as sonic markers of place and community – sounds that I have come to understand as resonating between our individual and collective identities. This paper presents some of the thoery orientating my compositional praxis, speaking nearby a reflective account of some of the compositional considerations and processes undertaken through the project. Through it I explore Karen Barad’s methodology of diffractive thought, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of speaking nearby within the interval, Pauline Oliveros’ practice of Deep Listening, thinking towards how these might meet through my praxis to come close to Timothy Corrigan’s Refractive Cinema. Åčçëñtß speaks to the complexity of authorship and agency in distributed, collaborative composition and the motive relationships between sound and image, spectacle and spectator – between the individual and the communal
Grasping Elapsing
Full text linkAn iterative series of hybrid media installations and generative, participatory performance projects, Grasping Elapsing (2003-present) attempts to show embodied thought process by creating open-ended connections among object, image, archive, digital process and word. The project is comprised of a combination of installations, performances, images created by the artist over time, images created by participants in prior and current performances/installations, live-sourced, appropriated images accessed through software, generative software that processes combinations of the above-described images, and a Twitter feed/archive. Given the highly-temporal nature of the project, it is difficult to analyze specific juxtapositions that might arise. This report will therefore mainly address the projects’ ongoing conceptual framework while referencing specific moments in time where it might be helpful for contemporary readers. The current iteration, Grasping Elapsing 3.1 is a digitally-augmented participatory performance with a “live” component of approximately twenty minutes and an indefinitely-extended digital component which is conducted online. The piece expresses a convergence of history, place and present moment through the use of digital practices and face-to-face discussion. It is conducted with an audience that, after an approximately eight-minute introduction, is invited to participate by contributing images through the use of scanning. The entire piece is enacted at a table with a large projection behind it. The artist sits at the table facing audience-participants. Throughout the performance, the artist delivers spoken-word content and participatory instructions. On the table are a laptop computer which the artist uses to improvisationally control a custom-made software application designed specifically for the performance. The application displays artist-produced, appropriated and past-and-current participant-contributed imagery, and also imagery generatively processed from combinations of all of the above-mentioned source materials. The output of this application is shown on the projection screen. Also on the table is a flatbed scanner which participants use to digitize images for contribution to the piece; scanned images are automatically added to a databank from which the application draws in real time
Revealing the Invisible City: Comprehending the human-city bond through data visualisation and sonification
Full text linkThis article discusses “Exposing the Invisible: A Brain-driven Audiovisual Walk”, an audiovisual installation that was part of the Digital Media Studio Project entitled Invisible Cities. Commencing with an analysis of the research, and experimental and compositional strategies we devised for the installation, we will explore the possibilities afforded from the creative combination of sounds, visuals, emotions and places, in relation to more general aesthetic considerations relevant to data sonification and visualisation. Our approach understands visualisation as a bridge interlinking the emotions with various types of visual elements and sonification as a translation of the inaudible into the sphere of the audible; most importantly, the combination of both as an instrument for comprehending the human-city bond via the embodied sensory experience of place. Our practice, inspired from the interaction between the lived body and the (urban) environment, uses the EEG data with an artistic approach in order to reflect upon and re-interpret this bond
Data-driven visibility: maternal bodies
Full text linkThrough artistic interventions into the computational backbone of maternity services, the artists behind the Body Recovery Unit explore data production and its usages in healthcare governance. Taking their artwork The National Catalogue Of Savings Opportunities. Maternity, Volume 1: London (2017) as a case study, they explore how artists working with ‘live’ computational culture might draw from critical theory, Science and Technology Studies as well as feminist strategies within arts-led enquiry. This paper examines the mechanisms through which maternal bodies are rendered visible or invisible to managerial scrutiny, by exploring the interlocking elements of commissioning structures, nationwide information standards and databases in tandem with everyday maternity healthcare practices on the wards in the UK. The work provides a new context to understand how re-prioritisation of ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ births, breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, age of conception and other factors are gaining momentum in sync with cost-reduction initiatives, funding cuts and privatisation of healthcare services
Scientific method and creative process for wearable technologies from invention to innovation
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is demonstrating how in the contemporary scene the boundaries between scientific method and creative process are increasingly blurred finding innovation as the point of intersection of this discursive separation. The analysis identifies the object of investigation in the emergent field of fashion wearables. In fact, the introduction of digital tools has had a significant impact on the fashion system, and wearable technologies represent the result of a new systemic interaction among diverse approaches belonging to different sectors. In this context, our purpose is to identify the moment when invention, seen as technological progress, becomes innovation, integrating and affecting people’s lives. To this end, the paper is firstly aimed in analyzing through case studies the different methods to design innovative fashion products. Both technology driven innovation and design driven innovation based methodologies are examined. The two strategies are compared and described in terms of phases, actors involved and validation of the obtained results, underlining the crucial stages of the process: the definition of the target and the scenario and the phase of product testing. This involves both traditional methods of data analysis for the technological functioning, based on numerically quantifiable parameters, and experimental verification based on the object-final user relationship. This test aims at “measuring” the effectiveness of the products in terms of comfort, usability, aesthetics and interaction. It is this methodological transdisciplinary practice that carries appreciable results concerning innovation. This approach leads to an emphasis of the designer’s cross role and it represents an opportunity for the academic research as well as for the market
Digital interactions: Sound and three-dimensional forms
Full text linkThis article discusses a prototype that explores the simultaneous manipulation of three-dimensional digital forms and sound. Our multi-media study examines the aesthetic affordances of tight parameter couplings between digital three-dimensional objects and sound objects based on notions of process and user-machine interaction. It investigates how effective cohesion between visual, spatial and sonic might be established through changes perceived in parallel; what Michel Chion refers to as \u27synchresis\u27. Drawing from Mike Blow\u27s work On the Simultaneous Perception of Sound and Three-Dimensional Objects and processual art, this prototype uses computer technology for forming and mediating a creative practice involving 3D animation, sound synthesis, digital signal processing and programming. Our practice-based approach entails the rendering of a three-dimensional digital object in Processing whose form changes over time according to specific actions. Spatial data is sent via Open Sound Control (OSC) to Max MSP in real time, where sound is synthesized and then manipulated. Sonic parameters such as amplitude, spectral density/width and timbre are controlled by select spatial parameters from the three-dimensional object. Sound processing is realized based on the changing of the three-dimensional object in time through basic actions such as splitting, distorting, cutting, shattering and rotating. We use digital technology to look beyond basic synchronisation of sound and vision to a more complex cohesion of percepts, based on changes to myriad sonic and visual parameters experienced concurrently
Editorial
Full text linkThe plethora and availability of digital tools and practices have transformed the ways art is created, perceived and disseminated. This had a distinct impact on how research is conducted across the arts and humanities as a whole from practice-led to process-focused and people-centred research. Airea’s first issue “Computational tools and digital methods in creative practices” germinated from a series of research focuses that began in 2016 when the research network (sIREN) was established by PhD students in Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh. sIREN\u27s aim is to create a dialogue between several fields and promote new perceptions of research based on diverse methodological approaches. It seeks to form a platform of communication among arts and other disciplines, technologies and digital media, theory, practice and collaboration. For this, we organised a series seminars-workshops during the academic year 2016-2017 that brought together invited speakers from the University of Edinburgh (across Edinburgh College of Art, School of Education, School of Informatics, Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and School of Geosciences), the University of Warwick (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies), the University of Newcastle (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape) and the National Library of Scotland, followed by an international conference in May 2017, which included an interactive format of hands-on workshops, papers and a performance session
Capturing, Exploring and Sharing People’s Emotional Bond with Places in the City using Emotion Maps
Full text linkWith the vision of ubiquitous computing becoming increasingly realized through smart city solutions, the proliferation of smartphones and smartwatches, and the rise of the quantified-self movement, a new technological layer is being added to the urban environment. This technological layer offers the possibility to capture, track, measure, visualize, and augment our experience of the urban environment. But to that end, there is a growing need to better understand the triangular relationship between person, place, and technology.
Urban HCI studies are increasingly focusing on emotion and affect to create a better understanding of people’s experience of the city, and to investigate how technology could potentially play a role in augmenting this urban lived experience. Artist Christian Nold for example, used wearable technology to measure people\u27s arousal levels as they walked freely through the urban environment, identifying locations in the city that evoked an emotional response from people. After these walks, people’s arousal levels were superimposed on a map of the city and participants were asked to interpret their own data, resulting in aggregated, fully annotated, and beautifully visualized emotion maps of the city.
Based on a systematic review of emotions maps in existing literature, and our own work which seeks to understand how people’s experiences of places in the urban environment that are meaningful to them on a personal level, for example the place where they have met their partner, could potentially inform the design of future technological devices and services, this journal paper discusses the strengths, limitations and potential of capturing, representing, exploring and sharing this personal, geo-located emotion data with other people using emotion maps. Although our analysis seems to indicate that emotion maps in their current form are only of limited efficacy in accurately capturing, representing and communicating the profound, complex emotional bond that people have with personally meaningful places in the city, there appears to be potential for the use of emotion maps as a provocation in a speculative design approach