Idea
These are just some first thoughts on a project idea. Of course there are still plenty of possibilities for changes or merging with other project ideas.
How do we think of places that we‘ve never been to before? How have the new media changed that way of thinking? How do we imagine a place in San Diego, if we only hear it‘s soundscape?
First of all, if we hear things of an unknown place, we are projecting images of our own experiences onto these “unknown” places, which therefore become “mappings” that are provided with our own mind.
But – due to internet services like google maps or google streetview, nowadays it‘s not a big deal anymore to demistify and to discover unknown places via internet. A massive amount of available image-data tells us anything about the far places. Still the place we expire via the internet is only a fragmental space.
So, what happens if we are confronted with a new random environment of San Diego?
My idea is to play with these thoughts and build an immersive space that can be discovered by visitors in weimar. I want the visitor to be confronted with some new, made-up space. I‘m thinking of an audiovisual environment that is fed by two different sorts of data:
- 4 channel (live-)audio-stream from San Diego
- googleMaps/panoramio images from San Diego which have been shot on a location that is close to the current position of the recording device
I want to discover new relations between San Diego soundscapes, google/panoramio-image data and the associations each visitor would have on his own, once the images are shown in a fragmental way only.
The plan is play and to analyze (FFT) the incoming live audio data (potential latencies are not a problem) and use it to trigger a generative collage of the picture-footage that is found on the internet. I am thinking of designing some nice algorithms that put together different parts of images in relation to the sonic events. So maybe if you hear some waves of San Diego beach or some car traffic, pixels from the images that are located near to the recording device will appear in a wavelike movement etc... The different parts of the images would then fade-out gently after some moments.
Some first visualizations
Participants
Links, Literature
more to come