Project Sketches

A Listening Garden

Urban Sound Installation
Augmented Landscape Architecture

This installation consists of a series of highly focused planes of sound oriented perpendicular to the ground, designed with the intention of being integrated within an existing urban park area.

The planar sound regions are created by custom-built arrays of HSS (HyperSonic Sound) transducers mounted in weatherproof modules integrated into long, concrete elements integrated into the landscaping of the park.

Each element within the series of sound planes can be controlled via a web interface (accessible via a parkgoer's mobile phone) which allows individuals to select prerecorded sound art compositions to be played within each sound plane. As others move through the park, they can walk through the selected compositions to navigate to an element that they would like to sit and listen to, or simply experience the entire series as a grouping of fragments as they pass through the park.

The park acts as a public showcase for new work by sound artists. Each year a curatorial panel would commission a series of compositions that would be available for the coming year.

Sound Traces

Urban Sound Installation
Architectural Facade

The front of an office building along a street with a steady flow of pedestrians is fitted with an array of small weatherproof loudspeakers. The people who work in the office building each possess an RFID tag integrated into their key fob for entry into the building. Based on their unique RFID identifier, the activity of their entering and exiting the building trigger unique sound passages on the building's facade, leaving a trace of their passage that fades into the sounds triggered by the movement of other office workers and the ambient sounds of the street

Each person involved in the project chooses their entry and exit sounds from a simple online database of sound passages (minimal compositions designed to easily mix and interact when multiple passages are active). The rules that govern how the passages interact are quite complex, triggering intricate compositional / processing techniques that create distinct variations as different sound traces fade into each other.

This sonic / architectural facade provides a gateway between interior (private / work) and exterior (public / multiple-use) space for the people working in the office, as well as a locational listening experience linked to the building and the activity of its inhabitants to the passing public.

This project can be ideally integrated into the premise of a media or design firm, in which case the open / participatory nature of the system would appeal to the sensibilities of the people using it, and would provide a relevant link between the installation's activation of the building's exterior and the functions or work being carried out in the building's interior. (Alternatively it can be integrated into a reserach institute or university campus, for similar reasons).

This project can be extended to include passersby with mobile devices configured to trigger sounds in the installation as they passed the building. This modification serves as an interesting liason between the company (or institution) that administers the building / sound installation and the passing public.

Dublin Lockout Centennial Memorial Project

Site-Specific, Interactive Sound and Video Installation
Public Monument

The following public installation / intervention was planned to commemorate and investigate the centennial of the 1913 Dublin Lockout (a historically significant industrial dispute / strike) within a contemporary artistic / urban / social context.

The project consists of a large-scale video projection onto the facade of the GPO (General Post Office) on O'Connell Street in Dublin, accompanied by a multichannel sound environment projected through a series of loudspeakers distributed along both sides of the street, mounted to the facades of buildings or arranged on stands.

The video content that is projected will be composed of video footage collected from different cities around the world (via an initial research and content-collection phase) depicting trade union strikes, shot by both professional and amateur videographers. The sound from these videos will be distributed evenly along the street through the loudspeaker array at a volume level that is prominent but balanced with the pre-existing urban soundscape along O'Connell Street.

The video segments that are projected onto the facade of the GPO will be selected by the public (in realtime) via an interface / kiosk set up on the traffic island / divider in the middle of O'Connell Street directly across from the GPO. The kiosk will provide basic information about the location / background / duration of each protest / strike video clip in the library, as well as an interface for queuing the video clips to be projected through the audiovisual system on O'Connell Street.

This intervention will take place in the evenings (after dark, to ensure a powerful projection) over the course of the dates of the original lockout (26 August 1913 / 2013 - 18 January 1914 / 2014).

This temporary urban intervention will force the site of the original lockout to reconcile its history with its current modes of operation (i.e. as a prominent commercial hub / transit artery), allowing the public to access visions of protest, civil disobedience, and power struggles from around the world. This action augments the location's intrinsic architectural memory (as the site of the 1913 Lockout) and seeks to distribute the significance of this historical action amongst an infinite series of similar events progressing from the distant past into current events.

The images of protest projected upon the architecture of the GPO over these four months commemorating the 1913 Lockout will not be a passive spectacle. Instead they create a provocative and difficult atmosphere, in which the public comes face to face with images and symbols of dissent, violence, and struggle that demand an active attention. It will truly intervene on contemporary Dublin, imposing its logic and thematics on a busy urban environment, creating a unique perspective that activates a local history and allows the public to engage with the significance of this history within a global context.

This intervention will offset the static series of monuments that dominate O'Connell Street, providing a temporal event that integrates itself into the active history and memory of Dublin's public. It fuses elements of public art, cinema, and video archive and integrates them with architectural facades and disperses them within public space. As a public artwork that consists of both a planning process (involving municipal entities and institutions as well as artists and technicians) and an actual installation, this project will foster an emergent dialog surrounding how we commemorate and remember the past on a monumental / civic / public scale, and how far we allow this act of commemoration to infringe on (and potentially disturb) our present. Furthermore, as this project involves an archival process (gathering footage of protests and strikes around the world), it will result in a framework that has the potential to be re-enacted in different cities to commemorate similar occasions, thus linking an event such as the 1913 Lockout to other isolated events in an internationally distributed context. It challenges Irish cultural producers and institutions to commemorate a local history via an open framework that includes this international confluence of events, instead of isolating a local narrative and echoing it within a self-referential action or event.