Paul
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.
- Working with the medium as one that has an impact on its environment is more interesting to me than only considering its simple function (e.g.: the microphone records sound, but it also works as an subjective extension of our hearing). For this reason the medium not only determines our way of working with things by their functions but moreover by their impact on an environment. So that there is a certain frame in which we are supposed to work. Every modification we apply to the medium changes this frame. Maybe we’ll modify not our own frames but these of the others and maybe this is what you simply call interaction: Modifying each other by using different media.
- I considered something that McLuhan regarding this sentence (“The medium is the message”) said to be very interesting (no quote!): Finding the “basic medium” of an era makes you understand, control and influence the basis of culture and society (of exactly this era).
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?
- Hearing a transferred sound while seeing a video/picture etc. of a certain place does not appear to be real. But assuming that there is no such thing we could call actual reality, it also does not have to have the claim to be real. It’s task may be to transfer a feeling, maybe to be an opportunity to find yourself in another place on the earth without being there. Therefore it is not necessary to determine if the sound (linked with video) is the actual sound of the place or if it fits because there is no reality. Becoming aware of this could make us able to relocate ourselves in other places with feelings we would actually feel there.
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?
- If our expectation of a sound transmitted through a loudspeaker is not met, I maintain we still will try to understand what’s the content of the sound (what is its message?) so that we might consider the e.g. LoFi to be part of what is meant.
San Diego with Audio from Weimar: [1]
Weimar with Audio from San Diego: [2]
Colin
When I consider my "practice," which I loosely define as interactive software and hardware design, I strive to develop interfaces that allow users to go beyond the constraints placed upon them by the "medium." In other words, I hope to give users the ability to go beyond simple digital workplaces in order to integrate as many aspects as possible of the digital, corporeal, analogue, four-dimensional, and real-time worlds. Hopefully this results in a message that will be unique and maybe enough removed from its initial medium that it creates a message unique to its creator.
Sound and space as we know them in this atmosphere, are closely intertwined. However, separating the two, or juxtaposing them, does not necessarily negate the environment. Consider environments with sound and no light, or light with no sound. We perceive our environment as a product of all five senses, yet changing one does not necessarily have to alter the others.
When we see a fire, we expect to look in its direction and hear a crackling sound. When we hear an airplane, we look several hundred feet in front of the sound's location for its source. A sound's origin does not necessarily have a direct relation to its output. The most interesting aural architechtures are the one that differ from our expectations.