TWO PLACES
17th of January - 1st of March 2008
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Hanging Gardens: Jürgen Simpson and Eoin Brazil
In Hanging Gardens, two exhibition spaces use identical speaker and sensor arrays to represent a group of sound producing organisms with an interactive relationship with both their immediate space and their dislocated other. Both spaces present an array of sixteen hanging speakers and nine infrared sensors. Each speaker can be considered as a single sound making entity with an awareness of the activities of its neighbors and the ability to sonically respond to those activities. In addition, the sensors detect human movement in the exhibition space and pass on the rate and level of this activity to both their local loudspeaker array and that of their distant twin via an internet connection. Therefore, each space can be viewed as being analogous to that of a field of insects each of which is in constant communication with its neighbours and with the additional ability to respond to changes occurring in both its own environment and that of its distant twin. The analogy to a living organism can be taken further due to the dynamic nature of the interactions which change according to time of day and the life cycle of the exhibition. Each garden presents three different states depending on the level and type of interactions it is receiving. The first is a totally passive state in which the garden’s occupants communicate with one another without any outside stimulus. The second is a state of local excitation in which the sensors associated with that garden’s space perceive change. The subsequent reactions depend on a number of factors including the rate of change and a histogram of previous activities in that space within a 30 minutes window length. The final state is remote excitation in which the sensors of the distant twin garden perceive change and thus cause a special reaction to take place. Unlike the first two states, which cannot be concurrent, this third state can coexist and overlap those previously described. It also makes use of all sixteen speakers to present a form of sound generation known as spatial additive synthesis, in which multiple loudspeakers present individual elements or partials of a single homogeneous sound. Rather than such elements being recombined before reaching the speaker as is usually the case, the sounds here are mixed together in the air and the listener will experience a very different sound depending on their position in the room.
Hanging Gardens