My research involves a study of historical and contemporary sound art discourse from a digitized postmodern perspective. Our contemporary society offers new opportunities for interaction, involvement and immersion. Sound, as a natural phenomenon, and medium of artistic practice, remains immersive, sensual, and elusive to capture by language. Conceptual modalities established by post-convergent and post-structuralist paradigms suggest innovative methods of organizing and presenting an archive of sound art in the early 2st century..
My work proposes that in a post-literate society, possibilities suggested by immersive digital technologies offer an alternative understanding of creative practice and associated discourse.
The focus of the work is the development of an interactive and immersive digital research methodology. At its core the project is a dynamic audio-visual-textual database allowing rich semantic manipulations of digitised cultural objects, a methodology that allows a researcher the chance to deconstruct, compare and contrast previously unconnected practice in an enriched multisensory, real-time audio-visual environment.
ImMApp: Surface : Web Interface
This short film introduces the first iteration of the ImMApp project created as part of a practice-based research program undertaken at the CRiSAP Research Unit (Creative Research into Sound Art Practice), London College of Communication . It is taken from the DVD which is to be submitted as part of the final thesis, and is supported by a 36,000 word written document.
The aims of the project are to develop a critical theory of sound art practice and discourse. Over 3000 works from 250 artists working with sound have been collected.
This dataset has been structured according to an exploratory ontology derived from the ideas of Michel Foucault (The Archaeology of Knowledge) and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1000 Plateaux, Kafka).
This presentation has been kept brief, but it is intended to outline the nature of the project to the invited artists and to the wider public.
The second iteration of the project, where the information is re-presented in realtime 3D virtual reality,is presented below:
ImMApp: Immersion : Installation Environment
Here's a short overview of the scope and nature of theImmersion dataspace.
It introduces the critical ontology as presented in X3D and then offers a historical flythough where we visit some emblematic years of the 20th and 21st century.
The final section of the film provides a sounding entry into the type of practice that occur within certain geographical contexts (England, Germany, Canada, Australia).
Hence we visit a series of digital assemblages that have been programmatically generated from the ImMApp database of sound art.
The depth of the exploration of the artists, and their works is, in the presentation, all too brief. The ImMApp environment is populated with over 250 artists, 3000+ works, 800+ audio samples and 200 video files. The purpose behind posting the film online is to allow those artists whose work features in the database to understand the nature of the project, and to hopefully give their permisssion for their material to be used in this way.
The project is entirely educational and research orientated.