21-31 Jan - prototype development, Sukandar @ Berlin, Damian and Yolande @ NIMK Amsterdam.
04-15 Feb - prototype testing, audio development, Yolande @ NIMK,
18-29 Febr- final instrument development, Sukandar Yolande Jorgen Damian @ STEIM and NIMK
3 March - six finished instruments
04-27 March - final refinements
28 March - opening exhibition @ NIMK, Amsterdam
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To breath, to walk, to swim, to rhythm.
The small boat stops becalmed in the middle of the sea, I climb overboard and swim away, then return towards the bow and together we move forwards at the same speed through the water.
The horizon stays at the same distance however far we move towards it. We are sailing forwards but remain in the absolute centre of a disk.
Learning to swim front crawl taught me how to breathe, how to stop salt water flooding down my nose making me choke at every breath.
I breath every two strokes, sometimes every three, whilst my view shifts from the underwater world, cuts through the crumpled surface light and sees the water level and the sky in a second before returning underwater.
Conscious of the responsibility that I am my own engine, as I breathe out through my nose the bubbles rise past my ears with a loud pressure.
The sun is extremely bright around noon so I have to use all three shades on the sextant telescope as I pull down the sun to rest its lower limb on the horizon.
Sleeping on deck ... the sun sets, the moon rises, the moon sets, the planets follow it across the sky, the sun rises ... the sun sets, the moons rises, the planets follow it, the sun rises, the moon sets .... the sun sets, the planets follow it, the moon rises, the sun rises, the moon sets ...
As I walk I remember, and the more I walk the more I remember incidents that I never thought memorable.
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how can an electronic trace contain my feelings, my memories? how can I recognize people and places in an abstract sound of clicks and tones? how personal is this, how exclusive, how intimate, how possible to share?
these sounds are made from a collection of traces of my journeys (physical, spiritual, emotional and creative) over 2007... but what do you hear and feel?
it's a paradox of invisible memories, searching out an electronic intimacy.
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balance and continual shifting of sails and weight in response and anticipation of wind and sea shifts. the precision is intense - the more finely tuned the sailor and the boat, the better performance through the water. i like it as an example of a physical and mental engagement with an instrument (in this case the boat) and the environment, where reactions and anticipations are used at such speed that it is essentially intuitive.
(thanks to my brothers Patrick and Vincent for taking me out to get this shot and talking me through the racing and tuning details - they are Campeones del Mundo! Silver fleet Flying Fifteens, Mallorca 2007)
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Thoughts on the shortest day... it's snowing in Amsterdam
I feel like the days have been accelerating and contracting at the same time during the first month of this residency at NIMK. The day of the winter solstice is a good moment for a turn around towards expansion and production.
Until now I've been in a period of investigation, searching through different technical approaches towards building my small GPS-sounding instruments. Most of this was done through experiments, face to face conversations, chance meetings, emailing and internet research. It surprised me that it's so time consuming, but if I didn't do this research I'd be unable to make decisions about the level of technology needed to realize the idea I'm after. This is the 'material' I'm working with after all. It's a balance between research, finding the critical amount of knowledge needed, and keeping open to changes on the ideas level - which results in a state of perpetual tension...
This artistic process has been like the sonic process of filtering and compression, now i want to start building from these fragments into something new.
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sounds for the first version of Taking Soundings made at the in 2006/7 KHM in Cologne
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Converting my patches between the two programming environments Max/MSP and PD has been easier than I thought. Contrary to what I'd been told, many of the objects are identical if not very similar, and the reference/help patches are often based on the Max documentation. At this stage (which is still early!) I'm working in parallel on both Max and PD testing simple sounds and controls. I have found two GPS NMEA data parser's both available online. The Max version written by Jose Manuel Berenguer can be downloaded here. A PD parser by Alexandre Castonguay is on the puredata.org site here.
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a sound/video link
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If a wave at sea only sounds when it breaks on land, how would one break a sound wave? Following the physics of breaking waves, I found even more interesting techniques of analysing the "skin" of the ocean. But how many ways are there to break a sound wave?
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The rediscovery of the techniques of traditional Polynesian navigation in the last half century or less, gives an intertesting perspective on accuracy of navigation and the western development of high technologies for this purpose. These traditional techniques include stars, trade wind directions, waves, using the canoe as a compass, following migrating birds and whales, cloud formations, changes in temperature and smell, floating debris and weed in the sea. All observations of the environment which made crossings of the Pacific Ocean by canoe possible, something we would imagine to be extreme.
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Max/MSP and Pure Data (PD)
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I am working towards an ideal of intuitive navigation, where a relation to environment (climate, terrain, landscape) is absorbed into an embodied awareness of location and movement, where advances in technological infrastructures for location navigation and weather prediction also become absorbed into our consciousness. At the moment these new technologies are leading us away from this ideal, because they are seen as functional time saving, economic, problem solving. These attitudes are constraining the development towards an expanded and expansive relation to environment. Through my work as composer and media artist I see the potential for sound to act as a catalyst towards a hybrid intuition of navigation. The refusal of sound to be held down by functional constraints makes it a fitting vehicle to explore this potential hybrid form of knowing and experiencing.
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I'm refining my search for a technical approach to creating a portable satellite sounding instrument for Sun Run Sun. I'm looking for a flexible open source solution that has possibilities for future changes and developments, both in terms of hardware and software.
I've had mixed responses ranging from "oh yes that's simple" to "you don't want to do that". I was surprised to find a number of negative responses from 'experts', that I'm being unrealistic to look for custom built hardware of such a small scale and expect good quality stereo sound. I don't think this is true at all, so I find it a strange reaction, maybe stemming from a fear of hardware tinkering? Another reaction is to point me to mobile phones and PDA's with a built in GPS. But this introduces fundamental compromises both on a technical and conceptual level - I don't need any of the complexity of these devices (screen, keyboard, network/phone connectivity, software).
I'm going along the lines of a small processor running Linux and PDa, (a version of Pure Data (often used for electronic music)) parsing the data from the GPS (all NMEA data, not just calculated longitude and latitude) for use as the sound generator. One of the requirements is that I can access and program this sound myself, and I prefer to use Max/MSP or PD for this. I'm pretty excited by Gumstix: tiny computers, motherboards and expansion boards, one of which includes a GPS module, the size of a stick of chewing gum, 20mm x 80mm. This could provide just the solution in terms of size, platform, performance and flexibility for future use.
But more work is needed to find the optimal solution.....
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The Leonardo Electronic Almanac special issue on locative media from 2006 has a good collection of papers, overviews and example projects Vol 14 issue 03
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participating in STEIM's (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) orientation workshop in Amsterdam, I'm introduced to their software LiSa for live sampling and processing of sound and JunXion to map controller information from all sorts of input devices to varying sound parameters. It means that I compose, control and improvise on the fly, using sounds that i have stored, record or capture, transforming them into new sounds. And I can gesturally control these sounds in multiple ways including assigning and shaping processes. Which is fantastic because it's flexible and fast.
the draw-backs (arguably) are: it only runs on a mac, works with sound samples not synthesis, is built around the low resolution of midi, and it's not open-source... all side-effects of the fact it's been developed by one programmer over many years for one specific performer.
but then my respect for STEIM lies in it's openness to many forms of instrument and music making, without imposing aesthetics or software choices on the many musicians and artists who become involved in one way or another. so what's the extent of 'open' and 'open-source'?
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I was at the start of this round-the-world two handed race that left from Barcelona 3 weeks ago. Here you can follow the continuously updated trace of the boats, get the latest weather reports for their area, and see a google animation of the routes taken so far, there is even a game for you to race against the real boats online (when i checked there were more than 500 'skippers' logged in!) I guess this is a nice example of my talk about the split between embodied experience of location and the virtual - but it's the sailors that are experiencing the hybrid form of location...
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follow the moderated discussion from 3 december on the Yasmin Mediterranean Art Science Network list on the theme of locative media art
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> a concise overview to celestial navigation
> a nice set by step description of how to make a sun-run-sun
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interesting sonification project by Andrea Polli related to climate, weather, environment antartica
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Ed Hutchins paper Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things
about the role of multimodal interaction in cognition examined through tasks like collaborative navigation using charts
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moderated discussion on the Yasmin Mediterranean Art Science Network list on the theme of the perception of climate change in art and technology
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impressions of Mutamorphosis international conference on art and science in extreme environments 8-10/11/2007 Prague. I presented this project on the Eco-Sonification panel...
...towards bodies created, morphed, grown, mutated into other forms and other technologies, resounding with alchemical and astronomical prague, as if these fantasies are becoming real here, as if they could exist. the fantasy becomes reality when Stelarc pulls back his shirt sleeve revealing a surgically modelled third ear on his forearm, and although it can't hear anything yet, the irony of the gesture is curious. the growth of stem cells, bio technologies, nano technologies, astronomists, artists working with these conditions, from micro to macro scales. Roy Ascott talks of arriving at the pharmocological moment. the talks use languages of life, death, feelings, senses, technologies, space, politics, climate, human, anthropomorphic, other, animal, plant. something is in the air, and i hope it is of allowing fantasy to become real, of the alchemical gesture of the supernatural through the physical, the creation of something which becomes something other...
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An astrolabe from 1525 from Nuremberg - I found it in the archives of the Utrecht University Museum Historical Instruments Collection. It has an engraved ground superimposed by rotating sun and horizon and transferable disks depending on your latitude. You/me are located at the point where the circles converge.
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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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