- How does the sentence “The medium is the message” by Marshall McLuhan apply to your practice? Comment on this quote in the context of your own work and in regards to this transcontinental collaboration, etc.
Like radio, telephony, and television before it, the emerging paradigm of screen-based, networked collaboration effectively eliminates distances. Of those earlier mediums, only telephony was characterized by two-way communications. Because of the power of vision, video as a bi-directional medium can bridge space in ways that sound alone can't. It facilitates the connections of people but also their contexts - their environments.
- 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?
A recording, whether visual or auditory, establishes a scene - a set of expectations - of the things which are likely to occur.
For the most part, we expect a correlation between the things we see and the things we hear. Both senses alert us to things to pay attention to: our hearing can inform us of things we don't see, and our vision can inform us of things we don't hear. The alert itself may be the fact that the two senses aren't in agreement, in which case we work to make them align.
A location swap is powerful because it provides juxtaposition, an opportunity to contrast two states. Attention is drawn to those characteristics which don't align, and to those that do resolve for unexpected reasons. We realize the things that we take for granted, and glimpse the structures that frame our perception.
- 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?
We have expectations of known things in terms of the kinds of sounds they're likely to make, and notions of what different sounds or qualities of sound might signify. When our expectations don't align with our perceptions, it's a signal that our understanding of a situation may be in immediate need of re-evaluation.