Q1. How does the sentence “The medium is the message” by Marshall McLuhan applies to your practice? Comment on this quote in the context of your own work and in regards to this transcontinental collaboration, etc.
Some points we talked about together:
- The internet-conversations show how the medium changes or way of communicating - we do things we wouldn't normally do (wave our hands etc.)
- Every medium provides a singular approach to reality. In a skype conference our two separated rooms find somehow together and we accept the medium as a our environment.
- We have different approaches in our work: When Jeffrey does Live Engineering, he tries to build a immersive environment that suggests what you hear is what happens on stage (even though the audience could never tell what really happens on the stage). In Ludwigs work, he reflects about the medium of sound recording and brakes the illusion of contiunity.
Q2. American sound artist Bill Fontana made several pieces in which he transfers sound from one location to another. How does this locational switch change our understanding of a the space(s) in question? What new aspects of a sonic environment might emerge? What happens to our perception of a location once it is stripped from its original sounds and these are replaced by sounds from another location?
First, we think the quality of the sounds being transfer from one place to another is really important for the listener, if the sounds can be reproduce without any distortion and playback in a n appropriate volume, the listener will have a lot of reference points to determine whether these sounds are from the real environment or cleverly played in this space. On the other hand, if the sound quality not that good listener will lose most of the reference point, and make judgement by using few points. Therefore, it's easy to let the listener make a misjudgment in the environment with poor sound quality. But once the sound sender took all of the reference points, and process the sound that the listener will much easy to accept these pre-prepared sound as the real sound in the space.
For example, during our conversation I can hear some birds sound from Ludwig's place, then he move the camera to the window want to show me the birds in the woods, I still hear the bird singing but I just can't see any birds in the screen.
Q3. How does an instrument through which sound is transmitted shape our expectation and the perception of it (loudspeaker, telephone, alarm-clock), in other words, what if the expectation is not met, what impact can this have on our perception?
Depending on the medium, we have different expectations concerning time and space: When you hear sounds through a telephone, you expect them to happen all at another place, but at the same time. When you hear sounds through a loudspeaker, you expect them to be recorded at another place at another time (if you don't see a sound source). This changes our perception: we have more distance to it, as a reproduced sound can be reproduced again and doesn't provoke a physical reaction. This is based on experience: The first cinema audience panicked seeing a train arriving.
Videos
We choice the train station as our theme, we shoot those video in San Diego Old Town Transit Center and Weimar Train Station. We take the door open moment as our reference point then switch the audio from each other.
San Diego + Weimar mix
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Weimar + San Diego mix <videoflash type="youtube">pbqpB9k-Bas|500|280</videoflash>