Setting Series
Archive of Recorded Performances
Found Outdoor Stage, Human Actors, and Mobile Sound Sources
Ongoing since 2015
“Setting” is based on an ongoing, growing archive of recorded performances that include a found outdoor stage, a performers interacting with a sound-making mobile device and a mechanical or electrical audio amplifier, such as paper bags or megaphones. The piece requires the performers to interact with a found outdoor site through sound emission. The performance starts with a sound recording made beforehand: a site-specific recording of the present soundscape on that site, which subsequentially is then cut up and “gridded” in time so that the enmble of performers, with their small portable sound devices, in transformed into a dynamic, moving, distributed loudspeaker system that plays back the site’s original sound – in a now rhythmicized fashion, into the site. As the sound sources move, the micro rhythms shift apart, and what emerges is a subtle soundscape that is hybrid between what is original and what is artificially added. A camera and a microphone captures the performance and feeds it into a series of collected media documents. It is this process of mediation that ultimately renders the hybridity of original/artificial ambiguous, as now all sounds are mediated. In merging a found stage, mobile loudspeakers, and human performers into mediated documents, the emerging whole renders all its components hierarchically equivalent constituents of a single, living space, taking place on a remediated outdoor lot, the “found stage,” and depicted on a screen.
#Mediation
#Generative Micro Rhythms
#Outdoor Sound
This series has been shown, to date, in 29 iterations internationally, including exhibitions at the Cabaret Voltaire Zurich (2019), CHIME Fest at University of Chicago (2020), and the Designing Interactive Systems DIS conference at Carnegie Mellon University (2023).