Image: Sam holding a phone receiver.
Image: Phone placed on wooden box.
Image: Wooden box placed placed in context.
Image: Writing out the code to play a song via arduino.
Image: Sam soldering the speaker to the breadboard.
Group: Sam De Armas, Chenghong Tang, Neeti Sivakumar
Project type: Physical Installation
The Anthropocene describes a relationship between us and nature. The piece is a one-way conversation in which we are rendered silent. Caught between the loneliness of a city and the immensity of nature, listen.
Description: Sound piece depicting a bustling city
Description: Sound piece depicting the immensity of nature with a voice narrating over it
Process:
Well, we started with a quick conversation about nature and the city. One in which we all agreed that the city (Time Square as suggested by Sam) could get particularly overwhelming thanks to noise. We all enjoyed our experience with nature but believed nature to be manufactured within cities.
Our initial concept would then be built around making two pieces, one for the city and another depicting nature, that could be heard together. We believed a phone to be a good way to build interactivity as well as isolate our main narrative, a voice, that was somewhat drowned out, to focus on.
Step #1: We found a phone receiver and a box which made our job a lot easier! We decided the perfect set up would be in the hallway of the ITP floor.
Step #2: Sam and Chenghong already had experience with arduino so it was great to learn from them. We added a speaker to the phone receiver that would play the audio once it was picked up - this also involved adding a button to the top of the box. The box also contained a speaker that loops our city sequence.
Image: Wooden box set up with the arduino and phone receiver.
Step #3: Working on the audio. We headed to time square to record our sounds. The city sequence consisted a number of audio snippets that we gathered from there, the subway, old recordings from our hometowns. While the nature sequence consisted of our individual recordings of hikes and some free audio available on the internet.