Table Mess.

Open Studios is looming nearer…

We had a little regrouping session with Andreas this week – to discuss about our upcoming plans for Open Studios, which will be happening real soon. Catching up with things, we were given a little debriefing on the small details while exhibiting our stuff:

Font size should not be too small, text should not be more than 80 words — an average reader will not read so many words at once.

Having an explainer video will come in handy.

Posters will be useful to give some context to our project.

Besides this, we went through Open Studios examples from previous years, where Andreas emphasised on the importance of space. Spacing things out is essential; we have to view our table as a presenting area. Where will we start, where will the viewer’s eyes land on first? It is crucial to have a good flow, and avoid having too much stuff on the table.

As of this week, I already had a rough plan on how to showcase my stuff for Open Studios – instead of using my table, I will be using the empty space next to Jared’s, since all my stuff were pretty big. I plan to use four pedestals to showcase the Vibrational Ground platforms, a table for Intimate Acoustics, and (hopefully) another pedestal for the items from the Soundwalks. It felt like a lot, but I sketched it out quickly;

Sharing

Andreas commented that it looked a little cramped. And unfortunately, since I was still working on my stuff, it was hard to visualise how my eventual setup would look like. At this point I was a little worried if I was going to have any space at all to showcase all three of my things; I had lots of plans to lay stuff out, but it seemed that space was a major issue in my case. And unless I had everything ready, it would be hard to visualize at the moment.

I presented the posters and an early look at Sonic Attunements: beginning with Soundwalks, learning how to listen; then noticing sound through Intimate Acoustics; and finally, feeling sound through Vibrational Ground. The three are strung together by the same thread, an exploration of how we perceive sound through listening, noticing, and feeling. I didn’t get much feedback on that, perhaps because (like I said earlier), everything was still at its most fundamental stages, so it was hard to get a clear picture of how Sonic Attunements will be presented.

Overall look for Sonic Attunements; kept simple

Figuring things out

Ironically, despite this project being about sound, I'm still very much a visual person. This week, I spent some time setting up mockups for my experiments, working out how each piece might be laid out, especially Intimate Acoustics. With the number of found objects and motors involved, I knew the setup was going to be big, which is quite a headache due to the lack of space.

I laid out the materials from the soundwalk: a publication for context, the listening score, the Journal-for-Listening, and clay responses from one or two participants. Remember the sound-touch-clay experiment from a few weeks back? I was planning to try it again for Open Studios, as a way to translate the soundwalk experience into something interactive, touching the clay would spark the sound recorded by that participant during their walk.

Arranging items for Intimate Acoustics

This week, it was also time to address the biggest problem: which objects to use for the Intimate Acoustics setup, and how much space they would take up. I think the tough part of this experiment is knowing there's never going to be a "perfect" sounding object. Each one has its own unique sound when it meets a motor. I selected a collection of” Natural items like twigs and leaves to produce rustling sounds, bottles of varying sizes, glass jars, empty cartons and more. This was the rough layout:

Messy and unpredictable, I know! For a start, this will do. After laying everything out, it was understood that I will need a whole table space for this; there were simply too many things, and this was without the addition of distance sensors. It would be impossible to keep to a small plank of wood, as I tried. Everything will look too cramped.
I guess I’m designing for an exhibition? Haha. I’m getting a little worried at the scale of my things for Open Studios, but we shall see how far I go!