Per-son-i-fy?
The Projektmodul focuses on sound, art-science practices, the environment and ecology. By interrogating particular objects of science and environmental phenomena, we ask how we coexist and how can we relate to the world around us. Particularly interesting is to investigate what reveals itself through experiences that are directly accessible to our senses and what is in different stages of instrumental mediation, translation, composition, transformation and imagination. What happens when we transfer something from one medium to another or put different media representations concerning each other? What if we try to make something perceivable at the limits and outside the spectrum of our sensorium or address processes that transcend our temporal dimensions?
Ecologies and ecosystems are polysemic, polyrhythmic and polyphon. Different voices coexist and merge, forming a complex whole that is inherently difficult to grasp and understand. The application of technology to measure, detect and analyse this complexity extends and complicates our sensorial being in the world. How many distinct voices or phenomena present at the same time can one follow simultaneously? What correlations between different phenomena can be made perceivable? By engaging with a variety of instrumental and perceptual modes we aim to gain a more nuanced understanding of our environment and in doing so we also want to consider how "we [could] tell ourselves about climate change without falling silent."
The course incorporates microcomputer technology Bela (https://bela.io/) and a variety of sensors. We will focus on multimodal approaches to interactive design and transformation, including data sonification and visualisation. At the same time, we will deal with compositional, choreographic and narrative strategies, including personification and possibilities for extending data perceptualisation through embodying and narrating. Practical outcomes of the course include handling and expanding the Bela microcomputer, incorporating sensors and dealing with different data formats, processing and analysis of data. Support will be given to learn basic SuperCollider or PureData programming to program the Bela. You will also learn how to document the design (circuit diagrams, conceptualising, implementation and testing), approaches to data sonification, sound synthesis and methods of making phenomena perceivable and translating them into physical—material and sensorial—worlds.
The project is part of a teaching collaboration with seminars in music and media studies at the University of Potsdam and includes an excursion to the conference and festival: Klima | Klang | Transformation – Neue Diskurs- und Erfahrungsräume zwischen Musik und Wissenschaft from June 13-16. Initiated and curated by the Kulturlabor Klanglandschaften, the University of Potsdam (Department of Musicology) and the RIFS, Research Institute for Sustainability, Helmholtz Center Potsdam. The aim of the collaboration is both the thematically focused exchange with students from Potsdam and participation in the interdisciplinary dialogue with work-in-progress projects within the framework of the various presentation formats.
Instructors: Prof. Kerstin Ergenzinger, Dr. Marcin Pietruszewski, Yue Wang