Street compositions

Description

This project is about encoding and decoding, in other words, defining the transformation of symbols from one set of symbols to another one. I use the evening streets as an input.The time when daylight fades and people are back home, windows start lighting up. I record the buildings along a taken street and use the lit windows on different floors to create a code for a music box punch card. The punch card is decoded by the box into a tune. The outcome is a rhythmic soundscape of the street. The sound is a reflection of a self-organized pattern of urban activity. Its variation and complexity depends on scale and liveliness of the environment. The result (up to now) is a custom made music box, amplified with a piezo pickup + speakers and street view punch cards.

Background+Development

My project was triggered by my media object writings and thoughts. Initially, I wanted to look at signal in terms of the way we receive information. Any form of information is signal. How can we transform, simplify, reduce or decompose information we communicate every day, into essentials of form and color. Simple visual code. Something we see as an dynamic abstraction, but it actually carries the same signal in a different form. The self-organised pattern that is behind the information.This derives from my interest in abstraction and the signals it communicates. I take as a reference point the research and work of Oscar Fischinger, Whitney brothers, Norman McLaren, Hans Richter( Rhythmus 21,23,25), . Experiments on graphical sound, early soviet inventions, work of Daphne Oram, and presently Derek Holzer. Hans Richter talks about the shape of feelings, a notion that relates to Suzanne Langer’s idea that artistic forms have the virtual shape of emotions. Signal, information -- shapes.

The street is an enormous source of information. I simply wanted to create sound from light and found a simple generative way that happens every evening in cities.