soundpocket 2: extremely local radio stations

soundpockets 2 illustration, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

This was the second project I made for urban interface oslo fall 2007.

I collected a library of field recordings I have made over the years. I set up an internet radio station for the project (using Nicecast), and played with different configurations mixing music and the field recordings, but ended up just using my own recordings.
I thought it could be interesting to stream internet radio, a global media, to very specific local areas. I found three locations in Oslo which would serve as the local radio stations. They were somehow connected to a clear visible cue in that location: A huge oak tree, a small sculpture, and a small pound in the roundabout. The range of the local stations would more or less correspond to these visual cues: If you saw them you would be able to pick up the signal from the radio stations. In numbers this would mean a range of 30-100 meters.
My original plan was to use the fm-senders for mp3 players which are mostly meant to be used to listen to the mp3 player through the car radio. This was partly because I was experimenting with solar energy as energy source, and because they were cheap. The range and quality of the signal wasnt good enough though, so I ended up getting the more powerful aareff fm transmitters .
The senders were placed with friendly hosts, letting me use their internet connection to pick up the internet radio stream.

The result was three very local radio stations sending out a continous soundtrack from other locations, so somehow these recorded locations came in dialogue with the physical locations of the radio stations.
The listening involved active participation from the public as you would need to tune in on your own radio to pick up the broadcast.

Soundpockets is a series of projects of intimate sound interventions in public spaces. By using fm radiowaves, soundbeams and miniature speakers to create local pockets of sound, the different projects have different scope and focus: creating private listening rooms, changing soundtracks of a location, displacement of time/or space and a bit of general disruption of everyday life.

Soundpocket 1: disturbing the soundscape

I made Soundpocket 1 as part of the exhibition urban interface oslo fall 2007.
From urban interface oslo blog:
“Hauntings? Dimension Doors? Time tunnels?
A boy heard what appeared to be the sound of a sheep coming from the wall of Strykejernet Art School.
A bartender at Blå was concerned when he heard running water like that from a leaking water pipe. The sound disappeared before he was able to locate it.
A seagull can be heard, but is nowhere to be seen.
Soundpocket artist HC Gilje is causing slight disturbances in the urban interfaces.”

Using a directional soundbeam to project a localized sound into a public space, this sound being only heard by the people within the sound beam which can be as narrow as 50 cm in diameter. It is similar to a lightbeam, only being sound instead. When it hits a surface it is reflected.
Soundpocket 1 was installed in a narrow passageway in Oslo, connecting two parts of the city. The soundbeam was mounted on a pan/tilt head making it possible to place the sounds very precisely in the passageway.

By bouncing the sound off surfaces, it seems as if the sound is coming from a window, door, elevator, a poster on the wall or just a more general presence. This made the piece into something which added another layer of sound to the existing soundscape, blending (sometimes disappearing) into the location.
Most of the sounds would appear to belong to the site, although dislocated (like the sound of the chandelier in the wind), the sounds of birds, telephones, babies crying, dogs barking, water running etc.

It was interesting to see how the piece was received. It was obvious for me that it wouldnt work very well as a typical art piece, it has a much more interventionist nature. I wanted it to be slight distortions to the regular soundscape of the passageway, and was pleased to see that the people who used this passageway regularly were noticing these disturbances. This could be described using the first of Barthes´ three listening modes: hearing involves “evaluation of the spatio-temporal situation“ and thus, it is linked to a “notion of territory“. It places the listener on alert when new sounds which dont´t “fit in” are heard.
By adding an extra layer of sound if also made people focus on the sounds which were already there.

The inspiration from this comes from when I studied in Trondheim in the 90ies, and I heard some stories about how a directional speaker had been used to cause a certain distress on a bridge over the local river: A person walking alone across the bridge suddenly hear whispering voices. An out of tune clarinet is projected into a marching band playing on the 17th of may (Norway´s national holiday).
If these stories are true or not, doesnt really matter, it is the idea of having a private experience in a public space which intrigued me.

Soundpockets is a series of projects of intimate sound interventions in public spaces. By using fm radiowaves, soundbeams and miniature speakers to create local pockets of sound, the different projects have different scope and focus: creating private listening rooms, changing soundtracks of a location, displacement of time/or space and a bit of general disruption of everyday life.

Verdensteatret installations

Louder_k11, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

This weekend I got the chance to see the two installations “Fortellerorkesteret” and “Louder” by Verdensteatret at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. Both come out of two theater performances by Verdensteatret. I had the opportunity to be a little bit involved in the production of Fortellerorkesteret so it was nice to see it in this huge beautiful space.

The installations are a mix of sculpture,sound,video,kinetic objects,light and shadows, and are inspiring examples of compositions in space. Fortellerorkesteret has a more theater structure, resemblant of old mechanical puppet theater, while Louder is more of a spatial experience dominated by the huge mechanical spider and the numerous speakers.

more images of louder and fortellerorkesteret

the loud objects

Marius Watz made a nice video documentation of the loud objects performance he attended at monkeytown.

It is a live physical computing concert, where they hook up different sound components on a overhead projector making it interesting also visually.

directional sound

May I Have Your attention, Please, originally uploaded by Mar.co.

I am doing a series of projects called soundpockets for urban interface oslo, which in different ways tries to create pockets of sound in public space. Some of the versions involve the fm sender- mp3 setup mentioned in the previous post, another one involves a directional speaker mounted on a pan/tilt unit, and this has been my second headache this summer, finding a controllable pan/tilt unit which is reasonably fast, which can handle a load of a few kilos and which is not ridiculously expensive.

Fortunately I have had good help from Soundscape studios. The first ideas was to use a existing movinghead light and refit it with the speaker, but it turned out that the motors wouldnt be able to handle the load. Pan tilt units are usually made for a specific purpose, either light or video, and the few ones which are available for general purpose use and which are controllable are very expensive.
The one we have ended up with is quite expensive, but is controlled using serial protocol, is made for outdoor use, and is powerful enough to handle video projectors (for later projects). It is also very fast, up to 300 degrees per second pan, and 60 degrees per second tilt. Hopefully it arrives next week.

The most ambitious plan is to control it using an arduino microcontroller, which will also control a serial-controllable mp3 player, the daisy, so I should be able to place sounds quite accurately in a space, and also create movements with sounds.
If time runs short I will use a macmini with max controlling the sound and pan-tilt unit over the serial port.

I have been testing two different models of directional speakers which uses ultrasound as the carrier signal, I will probably have to go for the smaller one, although I am a bit worried it will disappear in the ambient sound. It is also challenging to find the sounds which works best, and also how to deal with the sounds both coming directly from the narrow beam of the speaker but also the reflections on surfaces in the space.

The inspiration for this projects comes from when I studied in Trondheim in the 90ies, and I heard some stories about how a directional speaker had been used to cause a certain distress on a bridge over the local river: A person walking alone across the bridge suddenly hearing whispering voices. An out of tune clarinet projected into a marching band playing on the 17th of may (Norway´s national holiday).
If these stories are true or not, doesn´t really matter, it is the idea of having a private experience in a public space which intrigued me.

Maxwell city finished

Maxwell city: sniffer girl, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

Five intensive days with the Maxwell City Workshop at Atelier Nord is over, you can get some impressions here, as well as in Sophia´s blog, and a slideshow of images from my flickr site. There will most likely be a 20 minute radio program based on the recorded sounds later.

We mainly used two types of EM sniffers in the workshop, one antennae based, from this kit, and a coil based one, made by Martin Howse.

I have already jumped into another workshop, exploring video for stage, together with the director-, choreography- and scenography students at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo.
I look at it as a collaboration: I propose several tools I have constructed,we work with them and I modify them according to the feedback from the workshop. This will be made publicly available later.

spletizizers

spletizizers, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

I am in Köln at the moment preparing for the “The queen is the supreme being of the realm” performance. As it happens, I am staying in the same hotel as last time I did a project in Köln:
In 2002 I was invited together with my co-pilot Kurt Ralske from 242.pilots to participate in a project initiated by Tillmann Roth. Roth built a flexible art container/platform (see image), basically a mobile art production and viewing space. He invited different media artists to do a project which would later be shown in the container. The common link in the project was that we should either make use of or be inspired by the sounds of Alan Splet (scroll down). Splet was the sound designer for David Lynch on all his films from the Grandmother to Blue Velvet. His use of ambient sounds very much shaped a space.

Kurt and I did a 45 minute video improvisation with his sounds as the soundtrack. This might become available through Audioframes at some point, or I might put some of it online.

The queen is the supreme power

The queen is the supreme power 2, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

(Slideshow from the rehearsals here)

My latest collaboration with Yannis Kyriakides is a piece based on old telegraph code books. I use scanned pages combined with microscope texture from these books and project onto the orchestra from two sides, using the musicians as screens in combination with a wide screen behind, trying to create a dynamic space using text fragments and letters as projected light.

It is a coproduction between ZKM in Karlsruhe and Musikfabrik in Cologne, and is performed may 17th in Cologne and on the 18th at ZKM.

Synk at Dansstationen in Malmö

Synk, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

On Friday May 4th, I perform the piece Synk with Kreutzerkompani and Justin Bennett on sound. Synk was originally made in 2002 for the Ultima festival, but has been played quite a few times the last five years.

The idea of Synk was that no prerecorded video or audio would be used, only material sampled during the performance was allowed, to investigate live as raw material : to impose a structure on a live situation to allow for unpredictable results within that frame structure.

It creates a dialogue between the physical space on stage and the mediated space from the screen and speakers, and the relation between the memory and the present of a space.

More info on Kreutzerkompani and Justin Bennett

More images from Synk (click on the small images)

 

lab jan 2007: masking projections

lab jan 2007, originally uploaded by hc gilje.

(Slideshow of more images from the projection sketches here)

The second focus in this lab session was to work with video projections, and masking them to create several projection surfaces from one projector, and to be able to relate to physical shapes in the room, like my projection on a sphere in Iball, or the masking of video to fit the gallery spaces in one of the sleepers installation:

The simplest way to do it is to work with a 2 dimensional mask. I also wanted to try to work with 3D masks: projecting a virtual 3D version of an object back onto itself. In this way I managed to cover 4 sides of a cube with 2 projectors. Another thing I did was to link the individual projection surfaces (from one projector) so focus could move from one area to another, quite like how the nodes in nodio operate.

Finally, I did some simple tests using the projector as a light beam.