Overview :: AC PROJECTS / CCA Creative Labs Residency
I have spent the past month working with Euan McKenzie on a new Audio-Visual project that we're calling Trudat Sound & Light.
Rather than a dreary blow by blow of our (often tedious) coding adventures I thought I would use this post to collect some of my thoughts on what we ended up deciding was important to us and our practice, and why.
Firstly though, I would like thank Alasdair Campbell and the CCA for making the residency happen. The time, space and focus the residency afforded has been truly invaluable for us to develop a new way of working and to work out those details that all to often get overlooked. I don't wish to get gushy, but its really been that good - I am truly grateful!
Here is a (somewhat) concise demonstration of what we made:
We set out to develop IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS. Rather than putting on a show that people watch we wanted to design a room that people experience. And we wanted that experience to surround people. Early on we decided that we wanted to treat SOUND AND LIGHT AS ONE by creating a PLAYABLE electronic instrument that drives both the sonic and visual elements. Playability was important because we wanted to be able to control the room in real-time as a improvisational performance, rather than program a linear, fixed-media piece.
We set up an unconventional array of loudspeakers and experimented with moving sounds around the space. We found that we could both unnerve the listener with fast random movements and develop a sense of narrative with slower, evolving spatialisations. We mapped the walls of the room so that wherever we sent sound we could also send light and colour.
We tried various different arrangements of speakers and eventually opted for a set up that suited the room both in terms of acoustics and the physical design of the Creative Lab. This became an important factor as we began to realise the importance of playing to the SPECIFIC QUALITIES OF THE SPACE. In the Creative Lab one wall is broken up by four large rectangular windows which we realised we could project on as screens, creating a visual focal point that we could both use and actively choose not to use, dependant on what we thought worked.
I have known Euan for years and have worked with him before on a few occasions, but this residency really gave us a chance to develop our COLLABORATIVE APPROACH. It was really important for us to find a way of communicating sometimes fairly abstract ideas and half thought so that we could begin to actualise them. By the end of the month we hadn't fallen out and had managed to make something we were both proud of, so I'd call that a win. One interesting issue that came up was how to deal with notions of MEANING AND MESSAGE in audio-visual work. I have been keen to avoid tacking on overt and somewhat spurious conceptual frameworks in my sound work (though they can help in the compositional process) though I am keen and try to nurture abstract meanings and connections in the listener. When bringing in visual imagery finding a way to manage this this balance between concrete message and abstract meaning becomes even more important.
So, What next for Trudat Sound & Light? Now that we have found a working method that we;re happy with we can continue to develop new work – though it will be a shame not to have the CCA to test it in. Our desire to curate the whole experience that someone encounters when entering a room was in part inspired by the immersive nature of club culture – where a good DJ knows to “play the room” and you're experience is the culminating qualities of all the people, sounds, lights and the space itself as you encounter them.
We believe that the club as an environment for immersive experience has a lot of potential and it is this that we set out to explore with our current practice. In short we want to perform at gigs and club nights and build installations in social spaces that allow us to design and EXPERIMENT WITH THE ENTIRE AMBIENCE OF THE SPACE and immerse whoever encounters them in a new kind of multimedia experience that can be both widely accessible and wildly challenging.
