Högskolan i Skövde

A video work of a live performance

Multimedia art work/Performance

In our performance, we re-create a live version of an interactive web-based audio experience we previously designed to explore being(s) suspended in the emerging “new normal” spaces, patterns and troubled times of 2020 COVID existence: “PATTER(n)INGS: APT 3B.” In our original web-based piece, users/listeners were encouraged to explore the many rooms of a virtual domestic space, that is Apt. 3B, in order to eavesdrop on personal and global responses to pandemics and lockdown scenarios, new and old. With no identifiable graphics, other than a full-screen black square, the eavesdropper-user was asked to wear headphones and could only move a computer mouse blindly across the flat surface of a desk in front of a blackened computer monitor. Hidden sound files moved and shifted and had to be discovered by the eavesdropper-user to participate in the experience. Our aim in the performance is to consider how to re-create this experience in a new kind of live platform.

In both our designs (web-based and live) we incorporate voice narration, psychoacoustic phenomena such as auditory brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, and fragmentation/granulation of sound materials that de-centralize and deconstruct the sounding world. The boundaries between music, field recording, sound art, sound assembly and live-ness are blurred, requiring them to be reinterpreted by listeners and performers alike. We draw creative inspiration from personal historical accounts of plague and disease narratives, combined with original texts, recordings and contemporary (2020) news reporting focused on global destruction, recovery, resistance, and homage. 

Our live sound spaces, a reflection of our web-based ones, are re-created through two performers, Holloway-Attaway (voice acting/text production) and Fawcus (live electronics and signal processing) and a COVID-compliant interactor moving through the performance space, replaying the role of the eavesdropper. Narrative voice, psychoacoustic sound, and electroacoustic music will be dispersed and digitally re-ordered through patterns and rules evolving simultaneously through the mutual configurations of the performers and from the interactor, who will be cued to respond independently. In this way we hope to move listeners between listening and making states, while exploring cross-references and viral connections across platforms in the plague years.