A really helpful interview for me right now.

My thesis project is forming into an installation in which network data is materialized sonically via tactile transducers fixed onto different objects. These transducers essentially turn the objects to which they are attached into speakers/resonant bodies. The transducers I’m using so far are four Rolen-Star transducers and two Vidsonix Sonic Ghost transducers.

Textual Context

Brandon Labelle’s “Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art”
This book has served as a guiding influence for this project. It has give me both a historical and aesthetic context with which to work with. It discusses sound art regards to installation, performance, composition and via the perspectives of architecture, environments, and locations. LaBelle approaches sound from a perspective informed by Nicholas Bourriaud’s theory of “Relational Aesthetics”, and Labelle continually and effectively stresses sound as a relational art. From the opening:

Sound is intrinsically and unignorably relational: it emanates, propagates, communicates, vibrates, and agitates; it leaves a body and enters others; it binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends a body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating. It seemingly eludes definition, while having a profound effect. (Labelle, ix)

The section of the book with particular significance for my thesis is the final section, part 6: “Global Strings: Interpersonal and Network Space”. An excerpt:

What I want to underscore is the parallel tendencies in thinking through listening and media, for both extend individual sensibilities, distributing experience into a broader understanding of collectivity whereby the self is always implicated within surrounding space, no longer proximate but extended to global proportions . . . . I want to suggest that listening, and by extension understandings of sound, can lend itself to a recognizing of digital media: that the operations of sound, as media and phenomena, may converse with questions of telecommunications, digital networks, and by extension, the contemporary conditions of the digital age . . . . Such a description inevitably hopes that what we may recognize, in the incoming and outgoing flux of emails, SMS messages, Web-casting, satellite monitoring, hacking, and the like, a complex act of communication we might call a “listening that inhabits” . . . one that is active out there, as a process of finding home, making connections, creating space across digital networks–a listening that builds architectures out of interaction. (Labelle, 247-248)

External Work Context

David Tudor’s Rainforest IV (1973)
Rainforest IV is the major work of a David Tudor’s decade long continuum of experiments in resonance. Tudor and the group Composer’s Inside Electronics created a set of hanging sculptures that function as speakers via tactile transducers (specifically, the Rolen-Star tactile transducer listed above). When these transducers are fixed onto an object, incoming audio/electrical signals are transformed into audible sound by using the object as a speaker/resonant body. Rainforest IV was a collaborative piece, open to inclusion and participation to anyone who wished to join. It was Tudor’s way “giving the piece away”. The Rainforest series was exhibited throughout the world and in its first incarnation was accompanied by Merce Cunnigham’s dance company as part of the piece of the same name.

Video of a realisation of Rainforest.
Internal Work Context

My Device for Finding the Inherent Sonority of Objects (2007)
I see my thesis as a continuation of my own investigations into resonance. It emerges out of my experience as a percussionist and my fascination with cymbals. This device is housed in a collectible Rambo lunch box, and the circuit takes a 9 volt battery. I see this device as a hacked object that hacks other objects by turning them into mediums of sound/resonant bodies via a custom built piezo driver, supplanting their intended use-value in the process. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s musings on “the collector”, I decided to use a collectible object to house the circuit in because I feel like collecting objects can be understood as a precursor to hacking objects in that collecting, like hacking, is an attempt at replace commodity value for values outside of the “cycle of exchange”.

I attached this devices piezo driver to a cymbal, but with little result. There just wasn’t enough power. Funnily enough, what the device best resonated/hacked was itself, as it’s a mostly empty metal lunchbox.
More about this device>>

Here’s Nancy and me performing at Monkeytown in Brooklyn.

Youtube Link