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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
Here are some notes on other presentations:
Presentation by Charlotte Scott, who was inspired by the idea of acoustic community from Barry Truax and Raymond Williams' book 'The Country and the City' and did a study of the sound environment of Toronto Island, an archepelago of islands one kilometer from the city of Toronto and the effect of a nightclub 'The Docks' that was built on the island about ten years ago and just recently closed down.
Presentation by Kumi Kato about the soundscape experience of diving women of Japan, who for at least 1000 years have worked diving for abalone in the ocean.
Presentation by Lisa Gasior from Montreal speaking about recording the past in the neighborhood of Griffintown, an Anglophone/Irish community in Montreal. She's working on a recorded listening guide to the neighborhood, attempting to create a sound based guide that emphasizes listening to the actual environment rather than masking these sounds through the recordings. She talked about the idea of audio tourism and gave the example of Soundwalk audioguide for tourism that has been created for several neighborhoods in New York City.
Jim Barbour spoke of his experience as a child in Adelaide Australia listening to birds on the metal roof of his childhood home and how he had been fascinated with overhead sound ever since. It reminded me of being in the Sydney National Park, an incredible, huge park that at the time I was visiting was having some problems with flying foxes. Their name makes them seem much more benign, to me they were giant bats and there were hundreds of them taking over the trees in the park. They terrified me, in particular listening to their chatter and fluttering high overhead. Barbour gave an example of a cathedral with its huge, elevated ceilings and talked about his own preference for high ceilinged rooms.
Charles Fox presented an artist's approach to multi-channel recording and the art of immersive soundscapes, a project in Regina Canada. See http://www.uregina.ca/soundscapes for the call for next summer's project. He talked about his work with ambisonic microphone arrays or soundfield microphone arrays. He uses 6 omni-directional microphones in an array, facing out in a circle on tripods about 3 meters across, or a single tripod with 6 microphones mounted going into 3 DAT recorded, created a modular microphone array, 17cm across, approx the diameter of a human head. He also spoke about his interest in using new technologies to explore how animals communicate and about how important it is to be aware of the possibility of anthropomorphizing animal communication when making analyses. One of his projects, Speechless (2000), included a rich soundscape of animal sounds.
The Soundscape Association of Japan produced an important project called 100 Soundscapes of Japan and SAJ representative Keiki Torigoe. Torigoe talked about how for hundreds of years in Japan a popular tourist activity is going to particular places to listen to the soundscape. She showed several Japanese woodblock prints showing people engaged in this activity, including listening to crickets or the wind through pine trees in certain areas and listening to the sounds of different seasons, for example falling leaves in autumn.
She spoke about the importance of design in Japanese culture and how the field of design is transforming so that it is not only making something new but also preserving.
One very interesting example of a historical designed soundscape n Japan is called the Nightengale floor. This floor was created by a Japanese Lord who wanted to catch trespassers on his property. He designed a special floor made of wood with a series of hidden hinges and pulleys that would be impossible for anyone to walk on without making a sound. The sound the floor makes is like similar to the sound of a Nightengale, and even flexing one toe muscle creates a sharp chirping sound.
Dr. Michael Fowler talking about his project with Lawrence Harvey TEIMU, The Garden of Dreams, the aurality and acoustics of Japanese gardens. They visited a series of gardens in Tokyo and recorded using a multi-chanel microphone array. One garden in particular they visited was a rock garden or zen garden in Kyoto and was a garden that John Cage had visited and found very influential many years before. This garden is very quiet, almost silent, and Cage created a score based on the arrangements of the stones.
Like the composed nature of the visual, Fowler found that the soundscapes of these Japanese gardens are also very composed and wanted to study them to see if the composition of the soundscape of the gardens might inform architectural soundscape design.
The theme of the conference is 'The West meets the East: Physical, Spiritual and Post Colonial Perspectives'. One speaker brought up the question of a conference about post-colonialism being conducted in English, and expanding on that idea, Schafer talked about the symphony orchestra. He talked about how the materials of the instruments of the symphony are made of ivory, ebony, hard woods, gold and other materials obtained from conquered colonies, and that the music of the symphony is a demonstration of and celebration of the power and plundering of the West.
He spoke about how acoustic music brings life from death. Instruments are made from organic materials, like the bamboo flute that was played at the start the conference, or the wooden violin or animal skin drum. He lamented the loss of this organic quality in electronic music, and interestingly his statement was challenged by a member of the audience who said that when she plays the electric guitar in her studio, she is very aware of the electricity that she is using to create the sound, which comes directly from a hydroelectric plant near her home.
Schafer talked about how sound is 'sweetened' by distance and the pleasure of listening to sounds in the distance and how in urban areas both distant listening and distant viewing has become more rare. He quoted George Elliott who wrote of 'The roar on the other side of silence.' He believed she was talking about the new technologies of the time that were bringing unheard sounds to the forefront, for example the stethoscope. But Schafer wanted us to also consider the roar on the other side of silence as the noise that is harming our societies, both unintentionally and intentionally as in the case of noise used in the Iraq war to intentionally frighten and demoralize people.
Schafer talked about how it was necessary to develop a methodology of soundscape research as the years went by. He developed a series of terms with which to describe aspects of the soundscape. One of the most well-known terms is the 'keynote.' The keynote, like the key in music, is the sound that grounds all other sounds, but the keynote can be a sounds that is not consciously heard. He used the sound of electricity as an example and then paused for a minute. The audience because aware of hum of the stage lights, that was actually quite loud but not noticeable before Schafer brought it to our attention.
Schafer said that 'every sound commits suicide' meaning that every sound appears and then disappears. He spoke of the need for museums of sounds that have become extinct in our world. He talked about the limitations of the recording medium and 'impossible sounds' or sounds that cannot be recorded. One example he gave was the sound of a fire.
He also spoke about soundscape as an immersive phenomenon, without a center, or more accurately that the listener is always at the center of a soundscape, as opposed to a landscape that is seen from the outside.
A part of his talk I questioned was the idea of the 'phenomenological' recording, or a recording made without the presence of the recordist. He seemed to be saying that it was possible to create an objective recording, but I disagree. This prompted a discussion at lunch about Heidegger and soundwalks which highlight the presence of the body.
Two days ago I listened to R. Murray Schafer's keynote at the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology conference in Hirosaki Japan. Schafer is considered the father of the Acoustic Ecology movement, having started the World Soundscape project in the 1970's in Vancouver.
Schafer spoke about how in the 1960's he sent letters to all the most famous composers of the time, Stockhausen, Cage, etc. asking them one question: 'What is Music?' The only reply he received was from Cage, who told him that music is sound and recommended Schafer read Thoreau's Walden. There is one chapter in Walden devoted to sound that was very important to Schafer in the development of his ideas about the soundscape.
When he started thinking about soundscape research as a field of study, the sound of jet aircraft had just started and the mention of the term 'noise pollution' would draw laughter. At the time, the sound was considered what Schafer terms a 'sacred noise', in other words, a sound that is so dominant culturally that it is almost untouchable. In the middle ages the sacred sound was the sound of the church, which dominated the medieval soundscape. The church was so powerful both economically and politically that it was unthinkable to consider the sounds of the church as noise pollution. During the industrial revolution the sacred noise was the sound of factories, and in the 60's, according to Schafer, the sacred noise was the sound of technological progress, symbolised by the jet engine.
Today commercial sound, the sound of pop music and advertising that is ubiquitous in public spaces could be defined as a sacred noise in our corporate-dominated society.
One of my students, Heidi Boisvert, has put together a curriculum of Ecomedia for teens at the Bronx River Art Center. Classes are media arts projects related to the Bronx River Habitat and are doing Documentary Video, Game Design, Photography and Sound (sound taught by another student, Ricardo Arias). It looks like a great integration of media with the environment and is particularly interesting around the Bronx River habitat as a natural environment that is thriving despite its urban industrial surroundings.
As we stepped off the airtrain into terminal 1 at JFK airport we were met by two US military personnel in full uniform including M-16 rifles held across their bodies at a 45 degree angle. More were at the check in area, standing at attention next to TSA officials at a desk in front of a makeshift barrier restricting entrance to the security line. Next to them was a large trash can and sign indicating the ban on liquids and gels on the plane. As we walked past the desk, an agent was rattling off the restricted items "shampoo, hair spray, hair gel, mascara, lipgloss..." Chuck turned his head back "Chapstick?" "No, sticks are OK" I said and the agent repeated "sticks are fine" and waved us along.
In the Incheon airport in Seoul, it was surprising to find fewer security checks, we weren't staying in Korea, just making a transfer to Northern Japan, and there were no customs requirements or passport checks upon leaving the plane. We arrived at around 5 in the morning to an empty airport with nothing but a single coffee and sweet shop open, and we had several hours before our flight, so I started taking photos. The sun was just rising creating a grey blue mist outside the high sloping windows of the airport. The terminal was spotless and new modernist industrial with giant exposed pipes and granite tiled walls. The effect was of being under the belly of a giant blue whale skeleton, ribcage arching and sloping upwards away from the main corridor of food courts and shops. As I became more and more involved in taking photographs: the sloping ceilings, a pair of guards watching a soccer match on a flat screen television, blue mist on small hills behind a baby blue Korean Air jet, one of the sports fan guards came up to me gesturing and pointing. "No photographs?" I said. I had read recently about aggressive restrictions against photographs in North Korea, but didn't think it would be an issue in Seoul. I packed up, relieved that at least he hadn't asked for the memory card or camera.
As I stood on the moving sidewalk that cut down the corridor of gates and shops in the silence of the early morning airport, light streamed in from a long skylight above and cut in from the glass walls of the gate seating areas. Lavendar seats on granite blocks flanked tall sloping glass giving passengers a view of the runway and distant terminals. I stood gliding slowly listening to a soothing recorded voice intended to alert moving walkway passengers in three languages but at the moment lulling us into a kind of hypnotic calm, amplified by the vibrating hum of the machine walkway, massaging the bottoms of our feet and the palms of our hands. Looking up at the sloping ribbed ceiling, I thought of a Gothic cathedral, the majesty of elevation diverting attention to the heavens and wondered if the architect was trying to direct the attention of passengers in much the same way. I thought of visiting the Church of Santa Maria de Guadalupe in Mexico City, built on the exact spot at which Juan Diego received a visit from the Virgin. She provided him with proof of the visit in the form of an armful of flowers (some legends say roses). He wrapped them in his cloak, and when he presented the roses to the bishop, he was both amazed to see the flowers in the wrong season, and surprised to find an image of the virgin burned into the cloak that held them. Upon closer investigation, the image was found to be so detailed that the face of Juan Diego could be seen reflected in the eye of the saint.
The cloak has been preserved (to be honest, looking to me a lot like a mediocre painting) and is framed and placed in the basement of the most contemporary church of Guadalupe on the site. You see, the site itself turned out to not be an ideal site for building a large piece of architecture, and two previously built churches to Guadalupe have been sinking. The third and newest houses the miracle cloak, hanging above a modern altar. There is an hole in the floor behind the altar so visitors to the church can go into the church basement and look up at the framed image of the saint. Because there are so many visitors, the church put in a moving walkway in the basement, so as you pray, you glide along in a line of devoted followers.
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