“You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms! —Estragon in Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952
You and Your Landscape is an adaptive environmental sound installation and noise-masking system originally conceived for open-plan public spaces. As part of my ongoing design research (A Kind of Air) at the New INC incubator, the project explores sound, and its audible reception in the form of air pressure, as a strategic component of indoor climates.
The installation consists of a terrarium containing the remains of a fallen tree, in which the "live" sound material, extracted through modified microphones, sensors and electrodes from the vibrations of the bark's inner strata, is transduced and processed to compose a tridimensional noise-masking, weed-like sonic garden — or "friche", as landscape designer Gilles Clément would say.
The counterpart of this hybrid ecosystem is the interactive device that will spectrally analyse the surrounding environment and capture random speech fragments from site users and passers-by in order to produce multiple textured maskers: these will be remixed in real-time into the overall evolutionary soundscape so that, in its most ideal setup, a listener would be acoustically enveloped by the tight diffusing cones of any number of directional speakers installed in the space.
image credit: G.Clément, Jeu des échanges avec le milieu environnant (Manifeste du Tiers Paysage)
Similar to the Third Landscape promoted by Clément, and in response to the pressure from the surrounding environment, the emerging soundscape will alter its own configuration. A louder surrounding will induce a loss of sonic diversity, whereas a quieter one will favor the maintenance and development of a higher number of new sound “species” capable of positively influencing the overall ambient atmosphere. The compositional process will thus follow the inconstant logic of a biological system in a permanent state of adaptation.
“The issue is not what forms mean or represent but what they do, what they can do.” –J.Rajchman
Since 2009 I have been working with space and site as expanded – and expansive– instruments, and experimenting with responsive and interactive technologies.
Interested in exploring alternative forms of occupation of space –and experience of time– through a more radical conception of the materiality of sound, I would like to investigate new affordances of aural architectures, as well as of their designs, meanings and forms. By situating spatial acoustics and bio-art in an expanded field of relationships, between semiotics and human geography, landscape and environmental psychology, I aim at pursuing a "participatory" model of their experience, in which «the phenomenological field», as a «field of forces that engages the perceiver and the perceived in a dynamic unity», is «totally continuous with the participant.» (Howett)
Following the peculiar logic of authentic geometries of living, my intention is to treat the design of the acoustic landscape as a connective, aerial, time-based "medium of exchange", capable of creating and affecting new modes of relations between users and spaces by mixing ecological, experiential, and living dimensions (Corner). Organized as a working landschaft, the emotional, evolutionary, social infrastructure of You and Your Landscape should be able to perform at multiple levels while generating shifts in expectation, feelings, and associations (Descombes).
Finally, by promoting an art of the "informe”, or of «textures through which matter becomes material, and unfoldings through which form becomes force» (Rajchman), along with an alternative hybrid tectonics of sound, the production of which is shaped by nature, humans and live technology, my hope is to transduce the complexity of listening (and of its cognitive, physiological, and ecological implications) into a new form of engineered atmosphere or, perhaps, more simply, into a fuller –«synaesthetic, less picturable» (Corner) – kind of air.