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listen to Taking Soundings 2, made out of collected GPS traces from Portugal, Sydney, Holland, Spain, that I made at Steim summer 2007
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Working on a project like Sun Run Sun I generate a large amount of material and connections that get discarded, or rather, not chosen, in the final presentation of the work. This process of refining is crucial, but I've always looked for a way to let the branches of new ideas have their own life, develop in their own directions, grow and die. Some ideas need to be nurtured, others just take off with their own momentum, others make no impact at all. Instead of locking this process away in a box marked private, this blog aims to open it up and generate a platform for exchange.
Sonic navigations include:
navigation techniques developed by humans
navigation techniques developed by animals
specifics of satellite technologies
landscape and climate
interaction with instrument in an environment
underwater sonar
astronomy
sonification
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One integrated portable unit with GPS receiver and sound processor small enough to carry. With this small, light, cheap, durable, strong - the audience can take it out for walks, the percussionist version can walk carrying a loud speaker while playing. (Adapted with a phone card and network it could report back to a central space - but maybe this is against the idea of specific location "I'm here now".) So the time will be spent on developing small portable well designed hardware that runs the GPS and turns this data directly into sound that can be listened to on headphones. What sounds should I use this time? The ring modulations and clicks and white noise?
I am starting to look for a hardware developer/engineer who can design and build this in collaboration with me, and likewise the software needs to be simply developed and open source. Software is sound generation and processing, GPS data parsed to be useful for the sound, bluetooth, storage of data.
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Yolande Harris
artist in residence at Montevideo/ Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam
19/11/2007 - 19/02/2008
Navigations and locations, navigating through locations, locating my navigations, can you navigate?
I am witnessing a sensation of dislocation from my immediate environment by it's alternative representation in the data of position, the figures of longitude and latitude updated every second as I move. What place is there for my sensations, my phenomenology, my conscious and unconscious awareness of space if this knowledge is so efficiently and functionally made redundant by the technologies of satellite navigations?
Looking into historical techniques of navigation this split between environment and location, or location and position is already apparent, although a bridge was present in the direct observation of environment or sun whose data was then used in calculations. The technique called "sun run sun" to chart ones trace across an ocean requires taking three sextant sights on the sun, before during and after its highest point in the day. The data of the suns altitude at a specific time, the speed and direction of the boat through the water, the assumed (estimated) position, and the calculated adjustments from tabulated data, combine to give a location at noon to a variable accuracy.
In my mind, this time consuming technique that is so open to mistakes and so imprecise in its scale of accuracy, in short so much of another age in its priorities, is a perfect starting point to dream of the potential shifts occurring through new navigation techniques. Satellite navigation is being developed in a way that closes down the openness of direct observation and the possibility of mistakes, and the input of choice, intuition and improvisation. At the same time this satellite navigation does not need to be reduced to the mundane but could open us up to a possible consciousness of environment, a hybrid of locative intuition through technology..
This project will be an experiment in drifting, combining the accuracy of the grid with the intuition of movement. Electronic sound is the primary vehicle for exploring these open data worlds because its inherent abstraction refuses to be held down by the functional. Although it is made out of the information it receives from the satellites, this sonification allows us to observe the potentials of our floating extended locations. What is it to navigate? What is it to know I am here now?
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