[-empyre-] Participatory Art: New Media and the Archival Trace

Sat Jun 6 13:29:37 EST 2009

Hi Anna et all,

I just took a look at the iPhone app RJDJ, on-line rather than on my  
phone, so the experience was modified.  I think one of the big  
differences between this app and Sonic Interface, is that Sonic  
Interface is an immersive experience, designed to use the city as  
landscape for an altered walk through the world.  What it shares is  
the real-time experience, where it differs is in the nature of that  
experience.  The RJDJ project is an interesting “mixed reality” app –  
regenerating real-time audio with pre-recorded tracks…   Although it  
may augment a user’s world experience, and certainly remixes an  
element of the real-time experience, I don’t think it actually  
destabilizes the physical orientation of the body (up, down, left,  
right) in the same way as the immersive and off-center experience of  
Sonic Interface.  Sonic Interface is remixing the relationship  
between sight and sound.  It is real time, but alters that real time  
into an immediate past.

RJDJ reminds me of the Spellbinder project from Scotland http:// 
news.digitaltrends.com/news-article/13831/spellbinder-sends-invisible- 
art where you take a picture of a place on your phone, send it to the  
database address, and it is sent back with a “virtual” artwork added  
to the image that is drawn from the database by shape recognition  
software.  “Visible reality is augmented; the virtual and historical  
are made to be both overlapping and alive. (Ritchin, Aperture p76).”

I agree that to some degree RJDJ creates a “music-memory-machine that  
is about generating sonic space-time in-between the present-processed  
(realtime) and the past-retensive (prerecorded) such that one is  
continually producing a kind of sonic rendering of the temporal that  
cannot settle between the present and the past (or the 'to come' -  
protentive)...”  but in this case, that past is drum tracks or beat  
tracks ala GarageBand on the Mac. (At least that is what it seems to  
be in the on-line documentation).  What makes them past is that they  
are prerecorded, but they don’t really reference a past that could be  
called memory.

There was one project in a NYC Neighborhood Narratives class that  
references this continual processing of memory traces and creating a  
“platform for participating in a temporality that is both occurring  
but has not yet happened or only partly happened and that part will  
be open to re-happening.” The project, titled Palimpsest FM,  
consisted of a device that houses a hidden speaker which plays back  
the sounds of the same spot from an earlier time, anywhere from  
thirty seconds to a day before. The replayed recording serves as an  
audio version of a palimpsest, a proof of what had been there before.  
Using sound as her medium, the student created a nearly seamless  
overlapping of past and present where the sounds of today cannot be  
discerned from the sounds of the past. Like a palimpsest, it will be  
unclear where the past ends and the present begins.

  In projects like this one and others, “the past enters into a  
conversation with the present about the future, and each perception  
can be both amplified and contradicted, its authority less inviolate  
(Ritchin, p60).”  I don’t know if there is a mobile platform that has  
yet achieved this level of synthesis, although RJDJ points to its  
possibility.

Hana

On Jun 3, 2009, at 10:36 PM, Anna Munster wrote:

> Hi Hana and all,
>
> I found what you had to say interesting re the trace-body-media  
> relation generally but also specifically in relation to the Sonic  
> Interface piece you mentioned below:
>> A project that I think very specifically engages both sets of body  
>> functions in very interesting ways is Akitsugu Maebayashi’s Sonic  
>> Interface, a portable hearing device that is made from headphones,  
>> microphones, and a laptop computer. The participant is invited to  
>> walk around the city, and experiences modified sonic environments  
>> processed real time (with a 3 second delay) from the sounds it  
>> picks up. The experience of the altered environment generated by  
>> the software program influences and questions the sense of space  
>> and time. Mayebayashi has focused on the auditory sense as an  
>> interface between the body and the environment, in a different way  
>> than an audio walk of any kind – locative or pre-recorded.
>>
>
> what I think is really interesting in the context of participatory  
> art right now, is the way in which this is moving into a much  
> broader sphere of newer forms of participatory culture. So, for  
> example, see the new iPhone app RJDJ (http://more.rjdj.me/what/)  
> where you can use incoming sensorially activated data (movement/  
> environmental sound) to affect pre-recorded sonic data and tracks.  
> Essentially what you are doing is in/remixing environmental data  
> with prerecorded data on an iPhone/IPod device and listening to it  
> as it gets in/remixed. The app is free and being used to generate  
> RJ/DJ events in the same way people were using iPods for live  
> podcasting events a few years ago.
>
> The RJ stands for 'real jockey' with an overt reference to  
> 'realtime' processing and mixing. But what is really interesting  
> here is if we start inflecting this with a Bergsonian-Deleuzian  
> understanding then we come up with a kind of music-memory-machine  
> that is about generating sonic space-time in-between the present- 
> processed (realtime) and the past-retensive (prerecorded) such that  
> one is continually producing a kind of sonic rendering of the  
> temporal that cannot settle between the present and the past (or  
> the 'to come' - protentive)...
>
> This has implications for your below comment:
>
>> By uncoupling sound from vision, this project questions what we  
>> assume as "real".  "Presence" requires the constant stabilizing  
>> and synchronizing of vision and sound; an uncoupling of the two  
>> opens up the possibility for other presences, other experiences of  
>> "self." This separation also importantly has the effect of  
>> destabilizing the experience of "place."
>
>
> the trace, then, of both the machine and of matter (sonic,  
> environment, participant) in the RJDJ app is really an inmixing  
> rather than a remixing...I think this has consequences for all the  
> fairly boring and banal notions of remix/participatory culture  
> around (Shirkey, jenkins et al) and opens up, instead, something  
> much more novel about how one creates a platform for participating  
> in a temporality that is both occurring but  has not yet happened  
> or only partly happened and that part will be open to re-happening  
> (TOL so don't hold me to this ;-)...
>
> cheers
> Anna
>
>
> A/Prof. Anna Munster
> Assistant Dean, Grant Support
> Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
> School of Art History and Art Education
> College of Fine Arts
> UNSW
> P.O. Box 259
> Paddington
> NSW 2021
> 612 9385 0741 (tel)
> 612 9385 0615(fax)
> a.munster at unsw.edu.au
>
>
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> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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