User:Anita!/projectproposal
What do you want to make?
A large scale textile soundboard (made as an interactive textile), containing a series of noises collected from public spaces, more specifically squares. It can be played to create different public soundscapes, inviting the person interacting with it to listen, move and imagine a path. Different points produce different sounds caught in the city. The person playing has to move and 'perform' a different choreography each time because of the distance between the triggers playing the sounds, enhancing the physicality and embodying the soundscape. The fibers used for the production of the soundboard will partly be sourced from the squares where the listening and capturing of the sounds will occur, which will be washed, taken apart (perhaps dyed) and re-spun into yarn. This will be done to create a stronger connection to where the sounds originate from.
How do you plan to make it?
Learn how to make my own conductive yarn, spin test yarn with different concentrations of metal and test them out on smaller circuits.
Collect sounds, and fibers from squares in Rotterdam. This will be done by using a series of different listening methods, experiments and exercises I will come about during the development of the project. These will be documented and explained in the thesis.
Design and test an 'interface' for the textile, decide the spacing beween the sensors on a prototype circuit, have many people dance to it
What is your timetable?
October - recording, collecting and listening, drawing circuits, read more on interactive textiles, prepare for public moment and source materials needed for interactive textiles (yarn). Learn intarsia knitting.
November - recording, collecting and listening, test spin conductive yarn, do smaller projects involving woven (and knitted) circuits. Public moment tests and adaptations, coloquim with Michel (another testing opportunity), finalize proposal.
December - recording, collecting and listening, experiment with circuit connections, weaving circuits
January - recording, collecting and listening. Test distances between sensors (outside of the fabric) with larger groups, observe the choreographies people perform while playing. Start testing with woven (or knitted) samples.
February - recording, collecting and listening. Start selecting which sounds to use and why. Experiment with sounds on the sensors (in their skeleton form before they are integrated in the fabric)
March - recording, collecting and listening. Sound editing, making adjustments and playing with the music/instrument. Experiments with overlays, pitch adaptations, 'cheat codes' of combinations of pressing spots that will allow for sound manipulations to happen.
April - Finish preparing all materials for the final fabric. Spin yarn, finish the circuit and code, see what is missing for the piece and collect everything
May - Making the final fabric! And troubleshooting
June - Troubleshooting, graduation show, collective publication
Why do you want to make it?
Sound connects. It is not physical but exists so powerfully in space. It identifies places so distinctively but is not usually thought of or used to describe one, other than ‘noisy’ or ‘silent’. Imagining and playing with mundane sounds, exploring the landscape with no visual aid, to notice and create new imaginary paths. Re-publishing existing and real-life common sounds. Every time someone plays with the project will have a unique quality to it, it likely can not be repeated, making it so subjective depending based on the performer, much like sound in the public spaces where I will be listening and recording. Listening is something so important to me, and I would like for this project to turn players into 'listeners'. Fabric, like sound, is so textured. It invokes memory and is such a malleable and ever changing material. It is flexible and can adapt to its surroundings like a liquid. Like city noise, it is so ordinary that it becomes almost invisible
Who can help you and how?
Research and Resources Tutors, classmates and supervisor, by discussing the ideas, reading each others work and talking about research area, many references and recommendation come up, especially from areas that I have yet to look into, or quite far from my research but with overlaps in some way. This also counts for resources, sourcing and machines that I could potentially use for production.
Listening and recording People that i will encounter while listening in public space, maybe sharing personal listening stories and observations.
Prototyping the circuit + code Joseph and Manetta, the people from interaction station, workshops on wearables and interactive textiles, and possibly individuals still to be contacted with interactive textile experience like Wendy Van Wynsberghe, Anja Hertenberger and maybe more:)
Weaving (or knitting) the piece Tutors at the fabric station, by giving advice on techniques, methods and materials that would help in the construction. Station skills at the fabric station.
Testing My classmates and people around the studio. Guests at public moments, and (hopefully) also interested people I will encounter while in public space.
Relation to previous practice
I feel very connected to both listening and traditional garment construction techniques. Working with textiles is something that has been present again and again in my practice.
Before starting Xpub, I studied Industrial Product Design, and I focused on designing and producing soft objects out of fabric and paper. I also worked in a fashion Atelier for 6 months, mainly producing prints and patterns for textiles, sewing by hand and working with a mixture of delicate soft materials, metal and mylar to create sculptural garments.
In Special Issue 22, I worked on the 'curtain', a sewn modular archive as an element to 'safekeep' and protect the different projects, sounds and survival tools that were created for the SI. I also focused a lot on field recording, exploring sound in public space and interactive radio making (with Hitchikers Guide to an Active Archive with Thijs and Rosa).
In special Issue 23, I was really inspired to work with word/sentence manipulation, connecting it with sewing and quilting. I made experiments with sewing on paper, trying to create a very literal word quilt. I wanted to try to show the 'infrastructure' of my thoughts while reading and annotating these texts in a visual way, incorporating the seams metaphor quite literally. I tried to connect ideas from different texts by making a sewn collage.
In Special Issue 24, I worked with a very similar research topic to what I will be looking into in the graduation project and thesis, focusing on listening in public space, using textiles and paper to translate the sound. I worked on 'Knitting City Noise' a work in progress that focused on static listening, from one fixed point of view by using a sound sensor in Marconi Plein. From that, the sensor recorder yes sound or no sound based on the loudness around it. I then translated this nominal data to a punch card for knitting and am currently knitting it.
I also recorded sound while moving, in a series of walks, runs and cycles around Rotterdam. I then listened back and wrote down all the sounds I heard as a list, screen printed them onto cotton and sewed the paths of the recordings creating a subjective sound map of the city.
I also worked on 'Scripts to read the City' with Mania, a publication containing a series of scripts to look and listen in public space. The project imagines an urban environment that can be read, analyzed and criticized as a text. By reading the city in this way we find other possible ways of seeing, moving and listening. In a scripted city, marked by escalating levels of perfection, efficiency and control, the emancipatory aspects of urban life are undermined, allowing little room for anything that doesn't fit the image of the "norm".
Scripts to Read the City is an attempt to foster diverse experiences and uses of space, similar to a theater script interpreted differently by each actor. The tools of navigation are a device indicating which character to play and a guide, including a set of directions and instructions.
The project explores a relation between scripts and spontaneity, chance and control, and how scripts and unpredictability can enhance each other, stimulating imagination, encouraging us to engage with space from another perspective.
We also held a workshop based on the publication at SIGN in Groningen as a part of Spread Zinefest.
Relation to a larger context
References/bibliography
Deep Listening A Composer's Sound Practice, Pauline Oliveros
Walking, Listening and Soundmaking, Elena Biserna
Basta Now: women, trans & non-binary in experimental music Fanny Chiarello