Browsing the Synapse Database — which is searchable by “Individuals”, “Interests”, “Projects / Events / Publications,” “Organizations” and “Gallery” — I came across Nigel Helyer’s Sonic Landscapes R + D project:

From June 1999 until September 2001, Helyer worked as an Artist in Residence at Lake Technology in Sydney, developing the Sonic Landscapes Virtual Audio Reality system … The salient feature of the Sonic Landscapes project is the juxtaposition of a fictive (but very convincing) 3D immersive sound-scape, accurately positioned by cartographic software, upon a physical terrain. The effect is somewhat akin to Murray Schafer’s concept of ‘Schitzophonia’, where, by the simple act of recording, sound is split from its original physical context and projected into another context.

However within a Sonic Landscapes experience we are not simply dealing with the disembodied voices of popular music reproduced and re-contextualised via a stereo-sytem! Here we are engaging with a seemingly live sonic organism that is responsive to our presence, our orientation and the traces of our wanderings, and which appears un-cannily embedded in the site itself.

The prototype Sonic Landscapes Unit is capable of operating with a 2cm positional accuracy when employing differential GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) and with a one degree accuracy for rotational head orientation, which, when combined with Lake’’s headphones delivered virtual speaker array, provides a highly realistic immersive audio environment. Tracking technology for the Sonic Landscapes project has been provided throughout by the SNAP Lab of the University of New South Wales under the guidance of Professor Chris Rizos. Future collaborative projects are currently underway between the Artist and UNSW c.f. “Audio Nomad”.The choice of a prototype test site for the project was St Stephens graveyard in Newtown; one of Sydney’s oldest burial grounds, which provided an ideal pedestrian environment, rich in historical material and interesting physical structures.

The Special Player is an interactive performance in the context of transmediale 08 - conspire. Involving a sophisticated responsive motion tracking environment, four contemporary dancers and its visitors, The Special Player explores a massively disquieting conspirative narration.

In the performance, the ambient digital environment provides the dancers with a complex ‘Digital Aura’, which reveals the network behind the obvious. Relaying to the ancient human fears, The Special Player throws its visitors right in the center of a sinister conspiration. Using a secret motion analysis algorithm, The Special Player selects single visitors and equips them with overwhelming power.

February 1, 2008; 9:00 pm - The Special Player (interactive live temple show) - Presentation, performance and party
February 1, 2008; midnight - The Shaidon Effect DJ Set
February 2, 2008; 5:00 pm - The Special Player (interactive live set)
February 3, 2008; 5:00 pm - The Special Player (interactive live set)

I Am You: The Special Player - The Special Player is a result of an interdisciplinary cooperation project between international choreographers, contemporary dancers, the interactive live set group 02L > Outside Standing Level, the Berlin-based Picamotics/ATTOMAAKU-Platform and libavg, an open-source high-level multimedia platform with a focus on interactive installations.

To travel on a train, watch the landscape and gain an audio experience. This is the basic concept of what we propose. In the first phase, we will work with sound artists to develop the audio experience, developing and testing the basic technology needed for execution, and delivering a final working concept that can be implemented on a train ride.

The LocoSound team is: ALAIN BELLET (Graphic & Interaction Designer), Leader of the project. Works in Zurich as Freelance Designer and is teaching since 2003 as regular Professor at the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (écal) in the Media&Interaction Design Department.

IRIS RENNERT (Sound Designer) Works in the sound design and scenography field. She recently worked for the sound design of the swiss Pavillon at the World Exhibition in Aichi, Japan.

FABIEN GIRARDIN (Software Engineer) Doing his Ph.D. thesis on collaborative work in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He worked on a lot of geo-localised projects.

HANSJAKOB FEHR (Graphic & Interaction Designer) Works as Grafic Designer between Berlin and Zurich and is also developing interactive installations (former Electronician). He worked on the project “signalpain” during expo.02

OLIVER FRIEDLI (Pianist, Composer & Coder) Independent musician, composer and sound designer, he also works for the University of Art in Bern as a lecturer in sound design and media integration. He is also a Max/MSP specialist.

Formed in 1997, New England’s UNDR QUARTET are groundbreaking practitioners of low volume improvisation. Their performances are marked by a strong sense of intimacy and a deep sensitivity to the performance space. Devoid of standard musical motives and structures, their music demands a deeper involvement on the part of performers and audience. What happens at a concert is not entertainment as much as it is a shared sense of immediate time and place among all present. The group has performed at the Autumn Uprising Festival, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Shoebox Loft (home to many of their earliest and most intimate performances), the Lindsay Chapel at the First Church of Cambridge, and Brandeis University.

“Pioneers of ultra-quiet, ultra-spare lowercase electro-acoustic improv.” -The Boston Phoenix

“Influenced by the minimalist works of such composers as Morton Feldman and John Cage, and Japanese concepts of Wabi (rustic simplicity) and Sabi (loneliness, weathered surfaces), the undr quartet have developed a style as sensitive and responsive to the performance space as to the specific qualities of their instruments.” -Metroland (Albany, NY)

Working with analog and digital instruments since 1998, local musician BRENDAN MURRAY makes dense, long-form compositions of pure sound. Drones remain at the core of his work, with connections between the visceral and the elegant an aesthetic priority. Current activities include a new song-based band with live instruments called Paper Summer, a film score for a documentary on the Roma population of Macedonia, collaborative recordings with Seth Nehil (as Sillage) and Tomas Korber, a large scale audiovisual work with New York based multimedia artist Richard Garet, and a trio called Ouest with turntablist Jay Sullivan and longtime co-conspirator Howard Stelzer.

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008.

Helen Thorington: I understand that you do not think of yourself as a sound artist in Second Life. I wonder if you would explain why?

Adam Nash: I think of a realtime 3D multi-user environment (3D MUVEs), like Second Life, as a post-convergent medium. This means that no single media-element (sound, vision, sociality, network, time, etc) takes precedent, rather they all exist equally in a symbiotic relationship, without which none of them could exist.

[Image: Unsung Song #16: Blue Sound Ground]

Helen: Do you have any musical training? Do you play any musical instruments? Does this help or hinder your explorations?

Adam: I don’t have any formal musical training, but I do play a few instruments badly, chiefly the drums and keyboards. I have many years’ experience playing in bands and making music for soundtracks and performances. I also have quite a lot of experience as a live performer in performance art, dance and movement. Like all experience, it both helps and hinders my explorations in 3D MUVEs. While I am able to build and expand upon musical performance techniques, I assume that the same experience severely hampers my ability to see potential in a new environment. I really love music, but I think new environments like this reveal music as an outdated concept. I still think music is useful – indeed I release a lot of my own music under a Creative Commons license via my net-label at www.concentrated-sound.net – but anachronistic. I was first drawn to realtime 3D back in 1997, when I first encountered VRML, and it struck me as a very similar environment to the inside of my own head when I was creating music for performances. It is a spatial environment in which sounds can be animated in a way that is easy to visualize but impossible to achieve in the physical world. It is a logical next step to see the environment as the performance environment as well as the composition environment, and from there quickly grows the concepts that I explore in 3D MUVEs, basically audiovisual environments that users navigate within to create their own unique experience from the elements provided by me. It’s like the composer’s mind, the instruments and the venue all rolled into one.

Helen: Tell us about composing sound for Second Life. You have called it a “technically very limited and frustrating environment.” What are the limitations and frustrations? Are there redeeming features?

Adam: Composing sound for Second Life, or any 3D MUVE, is fun, because of this ability to provide the basic audiovisual elements and then leave the user to arrange (ie, navigate) the elements as they please. This is an extremely exciting and satisfying way of working, because it removes the need for arrangement – a skill, different from composition, that is absolutely crucial in linear music. There’s nothing wrong with arrangement (often in linear music it is the thing that turns something great), but often there are an unlimited number of potential ways of arranging a piece of music and the musician is forced to choose only one.

From: Infra_Assemblage

Also, with this idea of the melding of the composition environment and performance environment, the act of creating work is often enormously enjoyable because you get to fly around and through your ideas, trying out different ways of navigation that you may never have realized were possible when conceiving of the piece. It’s like a slightly more concrete iteration of the limitless imagination scape in which all these ideas are found.

The technical limitations of Second Life are significant and many. The main limitations, for me, are the lack of a proper modeling hierarchy, and a few things to do with sound, like the 10-second limit per file and lack of control over falloff. There is also an undocumented limit to the number of simultaneous sounds that can be played. On the other hand, there are a lot of positives about working within limitations, as the artist is forced to be creative and come up with novel solutions. It also means many formal decisions are made prior to starting work, which in some ways makes things easier. Like most things, it is both blessing and curse.

[Image: Unsung Song 2: Crescent]

Helen: Avatars play an important role in your work by activating the sound. And yet you have “core problems” with them. “The avatar concept”, you say in July’s empyre discussion “is the one I find the most troubling, and it also grows from the 3d-space-as-physical-simulation misassumption. There is no need to concentrate presence into one cohesive point (an avatar).” I wonder if you would explain what you mean by this, and perhaps suggest alternatives.

Adam: Well, if avatars play an important role in my work, it’s because they play a very important role in Second Life itself. The problems I refer to are both technical and conceptual. First, the analogy of a single point of presence, from which the rest of the world is perceived, and in which the rest of the world perceives you, arises directly from our physical world, where our sensory organs are coalesced in a single unit and cannot be separated. Recently, humans have been able to spread out perception and presence through technological mediation, for example cameras, telephones, radio and the internet, and I think we are certainly slowly moving away from the concept of a single point of perception and presence, but mostly it is still how we negotiate our physical existence.

But, it is a very underexamined concept in realtime 3D, and particularly in Second Life. This is true of the entire physical world analogy that controls the working concept of Second Life. Even though it may seem natural to use 3D space to recreate physical space, that is only one possibility, and certainly not the easiest, because it can never recreate physical space, only represent it. Once we move into the sphere of representation, different modes of perception are required (one never actually walks on a map).

Because the system to which our bodies are subject (ie, physical space) is now being represented, we need also to represent our bodies, not recreate them, otherwise things quickly get confusing and the representation becomes limited in usefulness. This happens as soon as we move our ‘camera’ away from our avatar – we are no longer seeing and hearing via our avatar’s eyes and ears, rather we are perceiving from whatever point in the 3D space that our ‘camera’ is at. Yet, within this synthetic space it is perfectly feasible that we could perceive from both the position of the camera and the position of our avatar. This is not difficult or unusual, in fact we are already doing it twice simply by having a default avatar in Second Life. The first, significantly, is the physical/virtual superposition, where my physical body is seeing and hearing my avatar see and hear – already I have two points of perception (literally and conceptually). Then there is the ‘over the shoulder’ point of view that SL avatars default to, behind and above the head of your own avatar, really a camera that is following your avatar. It is seeing and hearing your avatar see and hear. So now I am seeing and hearing my camera seeing and hearing my avatar seeing and hearing. I am simultaneously perceiving from three different points, literally and conceptually. I think this is one of the reasons so many people feel so disoriented when first encountering realtime 3D space.

Since it is possible, indeed common, to perceive from two or three points, then it’s a small step to expand the number of points of perception arbitrarily, both in space and in time (lag and multiple private chats are both examples of multiple points of perception in the temporal dimension that all SL users are comfortable with).

Practicing the agency of presence via multiple points perhaps seems a more subtle or difficult concept, but again SL users constantly deal with others via multiple points of presence. For example, most users quickly become comfortable with the idea that another user may not be seeing and hearing the scene from their avatar, or that they may be simultaneously dealing with the physical world and the synthetic world and the mediation device itself. Indeed, SL specifically acknowledges this via the device of having the avatar’s eyes and head follow the user’s mouse pointer when dealing with the user interface. This means that others’ avatars are, variously, a presence notifier (the person is logged in), a mouse, a representation, none of these things, all of these things and potentially many more things besides.

[Image: Unsung Song #9:Corona]

Helen: I can fly alone through your installations and activate sounds. I can get friends to move through them with me and produce different sounds. I can play with the work and it changes. Isn’t it in fact important for your work to have the avatars’ presence concentrated in one space?

Adam: In that sense, the avatar is serving the standard function of a mouse pointer for 3D space. Again, this is mainly because of the restrictive working analogy of Second Life itself, which enforces this role for the avatar, and it’s true that some of my works are a specific comment on, and working within, that restriction. But, it is not necessary for the user’s avatar to be concentrated in one space. Ideally, for many of the works, the user would be able to branch off avatars and move spatially through works in different ways simultaneously. Similarly for time. Or, to be able to interact with different works simultaneously in space and time.

Certainly, I consider all the pieces in, say, Seventeen Unsung Songs to be all parts and aspects of the same work, quite literally. Sonically, they are all constructed from the same rational scale that I devised, based on a fundamental tone of 77Hz then proceeding in intervals of ratios over 7. All of the pieces use this scale, and one of the pieces (Blue Sound Ground, which users pass through at the entrance) contains all of the sounds used in all the other pieces, both as a conceptual readying and also a technical device to load as many sounds into the user’s cache as possible. Visually, also, all the pieces are clearly very strongly related, sharing colours methods of distributing colour across hue, saturation and opacity spectra. It would be ideal if they could be experienced in multiple modes over space and time.

[Image: Anahata,The Mute Swan]

Helen: Have you considered what kind of work you might produce if in fact presence were not concentrated in one point? If presence were distributed over time, location, data and media?

Adam: I think it implies a more involved work, a work where the user experience becomes extremely important to the work. The extent of the user interaction over multiple points determines, to large extents, how the work develops and emerges. Works could take dynamic notions much further. For example, currently we can trigger a certain sound or animation based on sensed data about an avatar’s position and other metrics – this could be expanded to include many different aspects of the nature of the user’s engagement with the work. It suggests work that exists across environments, building on gameplay techniques to build a performative and experiential vocabulary cooperatively between artist and user. This is tremendously exciting and suggests a kind of work that could accompany users through time and space, growing and changing together. This kind of thing would start to approach the mechanics of true non-linear interactivity.

Helen: It seems to me that your work adds new parameters to sound/musical composition. In most of the networked musical pieces I’ve heard or seen described, this has not been true. Music remains music, separate or separable from other things, like the space in which it is played and its audience. And while I find this very difficult to talk about, what you introduce has to do with audience immersion and presence in the space; and audience activation of the work as a result. Thinking of the participant, I think of words like “experiential” (experiencing through the movement of my avatar-body as it explores the space you have created), the bringing into existence of music/sound. Thinking from the point of view of the music/sound, it’s not like filling a space with pre-determined sound (as so many of us have done in RL), but rather creating a dimensional space with potential… And that the two constitute a unique approach to creating and experiencing music.

I’m reminded of NOX Son-O-House, a public pavilion that is both an architectural and a sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound. It is an instrument, score and studio at the same time. A sound work, made by composer Edwin van der Heide, it is continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up actual movements of visitors.

Is this similar to the work you’re doing?

Adam: Oh, well, I certainly hope so. I’m not familiar with that work, but it sounds very similar conceptually to the process I touched on earlier, where the compositional environment, the performative environment and the experiential environment converge, and the resulting symbiotic relationship reverberates back and forward throughout the previously distinct stages, merging them into a new, post-convergent environment of interactive, emergent, audiovisual experience.

Helen: Given the desire for multiple avatars to simultaneously/collectively activate your installations, how do you reconcile the absence of avatars or the single avatar interacting with the piece with your intentions?

Adam: I’m not sure I fully understand this question, but most of my pieces can be experienced at multiple levels in terms of number of avatars, length of time spent, familiarity with 3D space, etc. Again, this is related to my desire for an approach to the medium that is not tied to a physical world analogy of a single person with a single body. Even though SL is a multi-user space, it doesn’t preclude single users, and this is true of my work too, I hope. Some works are probably more satisfying aurally when used with other people (eg, Rarer Air), but other works are designed for individuals to interact with different elements of the SL experience, besides the social, in which case the number of avatars using it doesn’t really matter too much (eg, The Space Between). Yet others are unaffected by the number of avatars accessing them (eg, Appolinarium). I really try to explore many different aspects of the realtime 3D MUVE environment in all my different works, so its difficult to align all the work with an over-riding desire on my part.

From: Bell Garden

Helen: Have you created sound installations in other virtual worlds? If yes, can you talk about the similarities and differences, pros and cons?

Adam: Again, I really don’t think of them specifically as sound installations, but yes I have worked in many different virtual worlds/environments over the past 10 years or so, including VRML/X3D, ActiveWorlds, Blaxxun/Contact, Unreal, Torque, Quest 3D, Multiverse and even GEM in Pure Data. Differences are mainly technical, with VRML/X3D being by far the freest and most able to accommodate large scale, unrestricted concepts. In practice, it’s always had some problems dealing with lots and lots of simultaneous sounds, but I think that Niall Moody has solved that with his Helian browser, though I haven’t had a chance to use it – I’d like to but SL has got the mindshare at the moment, so that’s where curators want you to work. It’s a shame VRML/X3D never gained wide acceptance in the media arts community. As for the other environments I mentioned, they’re all commercial products to greater or lesser extents, except for Pure Data, so they all have significant technical restrictions that arise as a function of the commercial aims. Multiverse looks interesting in terms of extensibility and freedom, but again I haven’t had a real chance to properly check it out. I’m trying to at the moment with my colleague John McCormick, but again we’ve been commissioned to do a mixed reality piece using Second Life, so that takes up most of our time. Pure Data (known as pd) is the opposite, it’s open source and specifically designed for audio. With the GEM library in pd you can use OpenGL to create responsive 3D environments, and John and I have been working with that a little, with promising results. Most of these environments have things that they do better than others and things they do worse. SL does a lot of things poorly and a few things well, with its popularity being its chief advantage at the moment.

From: A Rose Heard at Dusk

Helen: You refer to your SL pieces as “audiovisual sculpture” and “site-specific installations.” Can you talk about the difference, and what makes Seventeen Unsung Songs site-specific, but not A Rose Heard at Dusk?

[Image: A Rose Heard at Dusk]

Adam: I guess “audiovisual sculpture” refers to all my work in 3D environments, whereas something like Seventeen Unsung Songs is a collection of inter-related audiovisual sculptures that were commissioned by Sugar Seville specifically for an island that already existed, therefore it is “site-specific”. It wouldn’t be possible to recreate Seventeen Unsung Songs in its entirety without having an island that was very similar to East of Odyssey, but it would of course be possible to install individual pieces from within that show in different places.

Helen: What do virtual worlds offer you as an artist that real world spaces don’t?

Adam: To me, this comes back to my concept of the post-convergent medium. The physics of realworld spaces make it impossible to attempt such things as continuous realtime dynamic animation of arbitrary numbers of sound and vision sources based on continuous realtime sensing of presence and other metrics. However, the comparison still considers the primary role of virtual spaces to be a recreation of physical space, which is not what I think. The kind of art that I have ever attempted in real world spaces has always been primarily performative and very different from virtual work. I guess there was a point of crossover when I was still working with The Men Who Knew Too Much and looking to combine real world and virtual art, but since 2002 any work I’ve done that involves so-called mixed reality has chiefly been in the service of others like Igloo, but then I tend to do the music/sound and some performance. I don’t see virtual spaces as a separate reality, I very much see virtual space as wholly contained within the real world.

Helen: We’re seeing more and more artists combining sound/music and moving images/video, referring to themselves as a/v artists and VJs. Why do you think this is?

Adam: I guess it’s a natural progression from a past that had discrete partitions between all sorts of experience, as a result of both technical and conceptual limitations. As media starts to converge, and access to both the means of production and means of distribution becomes easier, it becomes more viable technically to enact the kind of concepts that naturally emerge. In particular, two generations of music video and clubbing combine with more meme-like concepts of emergence and networks to create a desire to operate across a range of media. Most people’s media vocabulary is of a sufficient level of sophistication that practitioners are driven to explore new modes of expression to engage meaningfully with an audience.

Helen: Are there any other artists working in the same vein as you?

Adam: Plenty of really interesting artists operating in Second Life, many of whom share aspects of exploration and practice with each other, myself included. Some who come to mind are Gazira Babelli, Annabeth Robinson/AngryBeth Shortbread, Christopher Dodds/Mashup Islander, Bingo Onomatapoeia and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, DC Spensley/Dancoyote Antonelli, Brad Kligerman, Juria Yoshikawa, Keystone Bouchard, Daruma Picnic, Christine Webster/Wildo Hofmann and Andrew Burrell/Nonnatus Korhonen. That’s just a short list, there are lots of people doing lots of interesting work all over Second Life.

Helen: Who are some of the artists you most admire?

Adam: John Power, John McCormick, Burno Martelli and Ruth Gibson (Igloo), Bruce Mowson, Melinda Rackham, George Clinton, Prince, Greg Egan, Yoko Ono, Morton Feldman, Brian Eno, Mark Rothko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. There are so many artists whose work I really appreciate, but those are the ones I genuinely admire.

Helen: Do you have predictions for sound art trends, developing technologies, the 3-D web? Have you any thoughts on what the future impact of immersion/presence might be? Do you think it might make “play” and “fun” more important to our lives.

Adam: I think we’re entering the post-convergent era, where distinctions between sound, vision and other media elements will cease to be meaningful. I definitely think play and fun will become more important as 3D environments grow in acceptance, alongside the growth of computer games as a medium. I certainly think that games, in the broadest sense, are the artistic medium of this century. Simulation and modeling will be of enormous importance to society and we will learn a lot from artists and practitioners of games and virtual worlds, and vice versa. The distinction between real world and virtual world will cease to be meaningful. We’ll see a convergence of networked experience via 3D, something like a 3D web but much deeper and more enjoyable than that phrase suggests. I definitely think we’ll see a move beyond the use of 3D space as just for representing physical spaces. The multiple points of perception and presence that we’ve already talked about will grow in acceptance and utility, along with an expectation that art will manipulate this.

Helen: Thank you, Adam, for this great interview.

Visit the following URLs for more information on Adam’s work:

seventeen unsung songs: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/unsung_songs.html
a rose heard at dusk: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/rose_heard_at_dusk.html
anemochord: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/anemochord.html
eudemonia stellata http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/eudemonia_stellata.html
infra assemblage: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/infra_assemblage.html

For information on Adam’s other projects, go to: http://yamanakanash.net/projects.html

Videos of some of his works are available for viewing at: http://www.waystowave.com/adam/secondlife/movies/

The single module consists of a transparent cylindrical body, containing the electronics and mechanics. Gearwheels and a gear rack move a bar visualising in its movement the intensity of electromagnetic waves. A total of 25 of these objects form a net, connected by thin, conductive steel ropes. This matrix is freely suspended from the ceiling as an independent space element. (Adjusted in parallel nets as positive and negative pole) indicating in its movement the formation of electromagnetic fields.

Individuals orientate themselves in certain frequency responses. The installation transfers the electro-sensory taken up data of a specifically chosen spectrum in a perception visible and audible for the participants. The selected spectrum encloses 900 to 2400 MHz, i. e. frequency from the range of cellular radio, wifi, TV, UMTS, radar. The participants of the installation are influencing the movement and the intensity of the reaction of the objects by application, e. g. use of their mobile phones. At the moment of data transference via cell phone activity the intensity is taken up and transmitted to the mechanics by the sensor technology and the aerial. The mechanics’ movement is set into an accordant rhythm.

The sound created by the mechanics of the objects is subliminal in its initial state. When activated by electromagnetic waves not only the movement and oscillation frequency increases but also the inherent sound of the servo motors. It unfolds to an crescendo together with the movement, interfusing the atmosphere with a constant but exhilarating, almost nervous noise.

At one level, it experiments with intuitive methods for freely navigating 3D virtual space. Users are invited to ‘fly like a bird’ to navigate through a virtual space. Using NO worn equipment - just by flapping their arms/wings and tilting their arms and bodies – people can intuitively (and amusingly!) navigate freely in virtual space. The metaphor used harks back to childhood play, imitating birds and planes in the playground.

The virtual space is regarded as the notation paper for a spatial, navigable musical composition – we use it to create immersive and responsive virtual spaces that can be explored both visually and aurally – an area we have been exploring with Altzero since 1999. Sounds become reactive agents, visualised within the space and with behaviours that respond to one’s presence. By moving through the space, participants are able to navigate the musical composition, as proximity and relative position directly affect what is heard.

The immersive experience, and the slightly tongue-in-cheek flavour of the interface, are both enhanced by the use of anaglyphic red/cyan specs to create a strong illusion of 3D depth.

Driftnet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5MvfctgaG4

Fly Like a Bird
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pURMOGPyCj8

The NOX MATER project explores the relationships between the notions of place and scale by investigating the potential of two unusual materials : darkness and silence. More precisely, it is an attempt to connect two places that are the diametrically opposed in terms of size and scale : the uterine matrix and the Universe as a whole. In an old Parisian building, a staircase leads the visitor towards a small vaulted underground room. The walls are entirely covered with absorbing materials, making the room is almost anechoic. All the sounds and noises emitted by the visitors are instantaneously silenced. In this small underground place, darkness is total, silence is complete.

After some time, the visitor gets used to the dark. He realizes that very faint sounds, very short and precisely oriented, cross the space. They are accompanied by blurred flickers, small luminescent halos that appear briefly on the walls. There is no echo nor reverberation. The lights and the sounds are instantaneously absorbed by the walls, and the room returns to darkness and silence.

These events are not random. They are triggered by the passage across the room of ephemeral and very penetrating cosmic particles called “muons”. Created by cataclysmic stellar events, such as supernovae explosions, the muon testifies for the mass-energy equivalence and for the time dilatation that occur at relativistic speeds (close to the speed of light). It relays information that comes from unreachable regions, and evokes both the story of matter and the very nature of the space-time cosmic fabric. With the neutrinos, much more numerous but infinitely more difficult to detect, the muons are among the only particles able to penetrate below the surface of the Earth,

Listening to the silence

The theme « Listening to the Sky » reminds the numerous attempts that have been done to convert in sounds the movements and signals of the sky, from Kepler and the Harmony of Spheres to the sounds of the rings of Saturn, from the roars of Jupiter, of the Sun and of the Milky Way to the faraway echoes of pulsars and quasars. Many examples may be found on the internet (see www.radio-astronomy.net/listen and the radioqualia web site for real-time sounds). Many artworks have been created from them (i.e. « Le noir de l’étoile, composition pour pulsar obligé », Gérard Grisey and Jean-Pierre Luminet, 1999).

As impressive as they might be, all these sounds tend to hide the fact that the intersidereal space is mainly made from void and silence. Despite their numbers and dimensions, the planets, the stars, the galaxies, remain infinitesimally small when compared to the spaces in which they evolve. Listening to the sky is listening to the deepest of all silences. The size of the cosmic abysses that separate the stars is frightening. Nothing moves there, and no sound can be heard.

Each and every place on Earth, even the most usual, are small fragments of this incommensurable space that our planet crosses in its travel, and that does not carry any sound. Even if it could carry some, it will not send back any echo : there is no wall or object to reverberate it. The Nox Mater installation proposes an experience of this space by creating a place where sounds disappear as soon as they are emitted, like in the intergalactic space. The small sound beams triggered by the muons will not contradict this space, but will make it deeper – just like the stars make darker the darkness of the sky.

Muonic showers

The sky is first and foremost made of silence, but each space fragment at every instant is crossed by myriads of almost undetectable particles travelling at nearly the speed of light. They come for old stellar quakes, from cataclysmic explosions, from primordial lights. They tell the fertilization of the cosmos by ashes of exploded stars. Some, emerging from the heart of a supernova, will join a nebulae from which a new star will appear, with is planetary cortege. Other, through their spectra, carry on impossible distances the secret of the composition of a faraway celestial body. Those which will meet a planet – such as the Earth – on their trajectory will trigger a series of events that unveil some of the most intriguing aspects of the cosmos, and of the relationships between time, space and matter.

The impact between a high-energy cosmic proton and the atoms of the upper atmosphere is a good example. It generates the muons that are detected at ground level. Despite its considerable speed, the proton is not disintegrated by the impact, but its kinetic energy is transformed into a wealth of new particles, called pions, which immediately disintegrate in muons. These events occur at about 10-12 km above our heads.

In their own time, the muons do not live long. Riding a muon with a chronometer, a very small rider would travel 2 microseconds before the particle disintegrate. According to the speed of the particle, this would allow him to travel about 600 meters – not enough to reach the ground. But the muon travels at 99,7% of the speed of light, which generates relativistic effects. For a ground observer who observes its fall, its time is dilated about 20 times. This allows it to travel about 12 kilometres, which is enough to penetrate under the ground before disintegrating into other particles. A single proton arriving in the atmosphere triggers a muon shower on several square kilometres. At ground level, they arrive at a rate of 100 to 200 muons by second. An horizontal hand is crossed by one or two muons by second.

The detectors

There are several ways to build a muon detector. We will use a composite detector developed by the Aware Electronics company in USA, and which made by two Geiger detectors (normally used to measure radioactivity levels) joined by a coincidence detector. The two Geiger detectors are vertically aligned. When both Geiger detect an event at the same time, the odds are very high that a muon has crossed them : any other particle will be eliminated by their detection by only one of the detectors.

The walls

The design of the absorbing wall will use a 2-layer wall made with absorbing panels. The inner face will be covered by cardboard boxes lined with mineral wool. The boxes will have different sizes and different orientations, so as to break and absorb as many frequencies as possible. Four bass traps will be installed on the walls and roof. The vault and floor will also be equipped with these boxes ; they will be hanging from a light wooden structure in order to echo the shape of the medieval stone vault. The floor will be covered with double-thickness cardboard boxes, packed again each other and filled with mineral wool. Then a large metallic grid will be placed above the boxes ; it will be covered by a second grid with much smaller meshes, then by a felt mat. This strategy, which has been validated by a specialist in acoustics, allows to create good quality temporary anechoic room with a limited budget.

Lights and sounds

Twelve muon detectors will be placed under the floor, in rigid wooden boxes. They will allow between 10 and 20 detections by minute. The light halos will come from small chains of leds included on small resin blocks. They will light on suddenly, then their light will decrease progressively in 45 to 90 seconds. The effect will look like a drop of rain falling on a stone heated by the Sun, and which takes a few minutes to evaporate. The light will be very faint : in order to perceive it, the visitor will have to stay several minutes within the installation.

The design of the sounds triggered by the arrival of the muons will constitute an important part of the project. We will work with very short fragments of human voices, very brief whispers whose travel in the room will follow the direction of the incoming particle. They will carry their own echo. The encounter of synthetically reverberated sounds with a wall that annihilate any reverberation will be the object of particular attention.

All sounds will be emitted by special very-low dispersion speakers, a recent technology that allows the sound beams to be almost as precisely delimitated as a beam of light. Using them in an anechoic condition is likely to produce a high-precision structure of space : a visitor who stands exactly within a beam will perfectly hear the sound ; another one just besides may hear nothing at all. To our knowledge, this coexistence in a small space of zones of sound and silence has never been tried.

Architecture, place and scale

This installation is directly in line with Nicolas Reeves’ former projects, in which scientific or technological concepts are staged in architectural installations with a sound or music component : the Cloud Harp, a meteo-electronic instruments that reads the height and density of clouds with a laser and a telescope,and converts them into sound and music ; it is housed in a small architecture derived form the geometry of a stratus ; Computer Architectones, small sculptures resulting from the evolution of digital chromosomes coding different musical pieces ; The Garden of Ovelynetrees, a piece transcoding into sounds and voices the decomposition of real oranges enclosed in a gold and resin sarcophage… It is also directly linked to the work of co-author Lorella Abenavoli, which brings to perception different undetectable phenomena (vibrations of the globe of the earth, sound of sap rising in trees…), and which has been exhibited in as prestigious places as the IRCAM, in Paris.

The installation carries an architectural component which is an investigation on the notion of place. This notion is considered both at qualitative and topological levels. The materials that are used (space, silence, darkness) draw the negative of an architecture, an anti-symmetrical reflection of the main images associated with this domain (mass, light, sounds of life). The underground situation of the installation conveys an important symbolical load : the damping of the sounds by the mass of the walls and earth contributes to establish an anechoic condition, an is directly linked to a particular ambiance. It awakes many different images. Some are directly linked to the location of the place, others to its particular atmosphere. The quality of an underground silence is very different from the quality of a terrestrial or aerial silence. The mythical serenity of buried places, like these closed caves whose silence is never disturbed, is not unrelated to the eternal silence of the cosmic space. To go under the surface of the Earth is to go towards its centre ; it is getting aware of geological time scales, and of the planetary nature of these layers that underlie and carry all the places where our daily life occurs. Like a uterine matrix dug in mother-earth, the small basement transformed into a cave becomes a protection against the infinity and eternity of space : it shields the visitor against immensity.

But this planetary nature immediately reminds the other end of the scales of the world, the scale of these huge spaces in which the Earth has been flying from billions of years. They can legitimately frighten anyone who, like Blaise Pascal, tries to grasp their dimensions. The presence of space is quasi immanent : it is revealed by these particles which cross everything at every instant, like small ghostly entities : « if everything is in the sky, there is some sky in everything ». The events triggered by the muons reminds the visitors the inextricable entanglement of all places, at all scales.

The matrix is the smallest inhabitable place. The Universe, the larger of all places. The former evokes the origin of life, the latter the origins of the world. The installation propose an encounter of these two matrices, the most opposed among all the range of possible places, through these infinitesimal particles which travel unimaginably fast. [From [SAT]]

Upon reaching the top of the pole, the red object drops and hits an acoustic resonator at the bottom, producing a sound. Sounds from neighboring windmills affect the overall rhythm produced by the entire set of windmills. The ever-changing wind patterns of Second Life are the source of variety in this strange, and fully generative melody.

The installation starts at the ground floor of Harmonia, where you and four of your friends can sit on a flying plate and be gently guided around the sky-paths between windmills. The five-minute ride is a compelling demonstration of a SL dimension that escapes the eye, but adds to our experience of space by enriching the depth of the environment around us. Learn more about the artist, Edo Autopoiesis (Edo Paulus in real life). [posted by Amalthea Blanc on Second Life Insider]