SoniCity Artist Residency at DAIMON
During the bulk of the month of June, I was the Artist In Residence at Daimon, an Artist Run Centre focusing on media arts and production, located in Gatineau, Quebec (just across the river from Ottawa).
There were several events happening at La Filature, the building that Daimon shares with AXENEO7, throughout the month, including several salons, a live film performance by Alex Mackenzie, and a really amazing art-punk band whose name I can't remember (I'll try to ask someone and update this post).
It was a little weird to be there, as the project that I applied with was originally applied and conceived as a project from my collective the memelab, but because of some seasonal timing requests, a massive flood that shut down Daimon for about a year, and a different residency that came up for Mirae, I decided to go alone, almost three years after the time that we originally applied. For what felt like the longest time, the Daimon project was always in the back of my head, and it never seemed like it would really happen, so it was an interesting - and slightly anti-climactic - to finally be there.
The piece itself is a locative media work packaged as a smartphone application for the Android mobile OS (with an iOS version coming soon). It utilizes libpd - the embedabble audio engine of Pure Data - to generate realtime sound synthesis based off of your GPS location. The sound studio at Daimon was a great help, as it was a difficult task to create sound that would scale from headphones on a mobile device at 21000hz to a larger system (the application allows you to record your data for playback at a later date).
There were a few idiosyncrasies with developing a GPS-based app, mainly debugging in the wild. For example, I had a few points where everything was working fine in the studio, but of course your GPS isn't changing when your still, so I'd get on foot or bike or transit to go test in the wild, and the app would crash when I was away from my computer, and I would have no way to look at the crash logs, etc. So there were some lessons learned there.
But all-in-all, it was great to have a project that forced you to get outside and explore the surrounding geography - after all, that was the main driving force of the project, to make you play your environment as an instrument, and to causally question said environment and your interaction with it.
The source code is on my GitHub - it is still incomplete, but feel free to check it out. I haven't added a licence to it yet, but there are dependencies (BSD) from some of the libraries I used.
You can find some older information on the history of the project on the memelab site and on my site, which will be updated once the project is really finished.
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