- 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.
Kevin: 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. This presents an interesting schism: on one hand, people who have never met are able to communicate intimately; on the other, the people we come to know in this way are people we are unlikely to ever meet in person.
Alex: I think McLuhans thoughts are still interesting. Since the 20th century, the physical ascertainable reality is being changed. As reasons for that one can see two technological innovations, which can be recognized in the development of mass media as well as in pieces of contemporary art: First, it's the increase of velocity which is now beyond the skills of human cognition, and second, it's the digitalization, the conversion of an anlogue "reality" towards a code-based (and therefore arbitrarily changeable) level. According to McLuhan, the message of every medium is "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs." In other words: Media have the function to translate experiences into new forms, they are, as has often been said, the extensions of our sensory organs. These possibilities of dealing with reality and of shaping the experience of old and new phenomenons in an artistic way are of a major importance to my own works. And also for the cooperation with our partners in San Diego, the thoughts of McLuhan are not unimportant, because the process of a mediatization of cognition is ever since not only a process of removal from physicalness. It is – due to the exceedings of physicalness and its implications – much more the transgression of the mechanistic system in general. Thus, the project-title "LoFi Sounds in HiFi Spaces" already implies two cores of our research and our projects. To say it with McLuhan, beyond a mechanistic point of view, we are approaching a comprehension of virtual systems, such as one is sound or the bridged-space we create. Considering our common meetings which are mediated via skype or the small experiments like the interchanged audio-visual relations in our recent works, i think that the interesting implications in dealing with these specifics of recent media innovations are already beginning to be recognizable at this stage of our project, and of course, they will be marked clearly, they will be the message, no matter if they are LoFi or HiFi or raspberryPi.
- 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?
Kevin: 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.
Alex: As Kevin already observed very well, we expect a correlation between the things we see and the things we hear. The perception of our natural environment has always been multimodal, it always occured with multiple sensory organs at once. That is due to the fact, that our natural environment does not appear in isolated and independent modalities, it appears much more as a unit of optical, acoustical and/or other stimulations. The "non-natural" ability for a splitted human perception is only possible due to an enormous effort in terms of abstraction. Therefore, works like those of Bill Fontana offer the possibility of a multimodal perception, but on the same hand play with our confirmed habits of trying to put everything in a relation. I think that the locational switch of sound gives the place a different emotional shape and therefore influences our rational and visual perception. It challenges our habits and makes us reinterpret the occuring phenomenons, which is an ideal mode of artistic examination.
- 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?
Kevin: 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.
Alex: The need of re-evaluation is a nice point, because by doing this, it means that we pay much more attention towards something than we would have done otherwise.