GMU:I and my Max/Elizabeth McTernan: Difference between revisions

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Elizabeth McTernan

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+JANUARY 2021
+'''Project Summary'''
+''Sounding Landshapes'' – digital drawings of objects as sensed with sound. Data collected by scanning objects repeatedly over time with a self-devised ultrasonic sensor device.
+Sounding is traditionally a technique by which a boat, outfitted with a sonar device, floats atop the surface of a body of water and measures its depths. Meanwhile, sonography is a method that uses sound to read and image surfaces, most commonly in medicine and geology. In this work, I am interested in sounding as the action and sonography in the sense of its literal etymological meaning “drawing with sound.”
+I have chosen sound over other higher-precision options, such as lasers, because I am interested in sound as a specifically Earth-bound medium – sound cannot travel through the void of outer space, so it is a particularly Earthly medium; it is explicitly terrestrial. This interests me when trying to (re)connect to the Earth through artistic practice, using sensors beyond my own body’s senses.
+After having made a series of 2D hypothetical sounding studies using ink on paper, I have built my own self-devised sonar tool in the hope of extending the hypothetical 2D sounding studies of my drawings into the 3D space of the “real” world. At this stage of development, the ultrasonic sensor is mounted on a customized linear actuator and moves back and forth like a scanner over the surface of whatever object I put under it. It obtains a reading by emitting regular ultrasonic clicks that hit the surface of the object and then bounce back to the device. A programmed stepper motor ensures that the movement is steady and predictable so that the data is meaningful.
+The device records the distances between the mounted sensor and the surface/object, so the data collected during this process can then be used to reconstitute the form of the object in digital space or in analogue drawings, as seen through sound. I constructed some simple geometrical 3D shapes out of heavy paper and have “sounded” them with my machine – they are intentionally similar to the 2D shapes I used in my preceding drawings. I am currently taking a class in Max/MSP to have more options for visualizing and animating the data I collect.
 JANUARY 2021