Final solo project - Royal College of Art MA Digital Direction
The project: The first part is an audio documentary of my ethnographic research: I interviewed diverse people related to grief in someway and interspersed their thoughts with my own reflections. The central piece is an immersive ‘garden’, mediated by digital and sonic technology that creates an awareness of mortality and of bodily presence, countering our inability to grasp mortality in an ‘immortal’ digital age.
The background: For millennia, death was a common theme of art and literature, often referred to as memento mori. However, in contemporary society, we have lost touch with mortality awareness as technological advancements facilitate the rise of the immortality myth - we can live on forever online or optimise our biological rhythms in the hope of becoming more productive.
Yet we still cannot talk about death. Stemming from my own personal encounters with loss, my immersive and interactive sound installation draws attention to the body and breath: amplifying physical presence. I hoped to reclaim a sense of mortality awareness, as a counter to the prevailing notion of technological immortality.
When: Below is some documentation from the exhibition held from the 21st to the 23rd February in the Steven’s Building at the Royal College of Art.
How I made it: The sound exhibition was a 4-channel spatial audio soundscape. The foundation of the soundscape was a field recording I took at Highgate Cemetery. At 2 minute intervals, the main piece started. Inspired by ASMR, it combines especially ordered clips of breathing and whispering, with bits of spoken word of my own writing.
The light sculpture was programmed using arduino and processing to be synchronised to the recording of the breathing. The Xbox Kinect was linked to the subwoofer and programmed to layer tonally different sine waves (that I modelled on the sound wave of the breath) on top of one another. This meant that when there were more people present, the bass and the vibrations were greater.
