Mediating Place as Staging Time in “Setting”: Sonic Interactive Mobile Technology as an Art Performance
Marcel Zaes Sagesser · Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2023
“Setting” is a series of technology-driven outdoor performances, exhibited as a video triptych with sound in which a local Pittsburgh realization is juxtaposed with the larger archival history of the piece that has been realized in nearly 30 other places to date. The piece comprises a concept, a mobile phone app in the form of an interactive, sound-making website, and a group of performers who carry the mobile phones through an outdoor site, thereby activating both the found site and the community of conference participants. Site-specific field recordings of the local site feed the app and are algorithmically processed and transformed into a rhythmicized techno-sonic collage that is then emitted as an emergent sonic texture on the local site by the system of an asynchronous “distributed loudspeaker” made up of the performers’ mobile phones. The performers are subjected to the algorithmic decisions that the app communicates to them, yet they also have some agency in how they interact both with the app and the site. “Setting,” as a series, mediates the environmental sound of a large number of found sites, sonically “amplifies” these sites by a designed system that generates heavy rhythm out of a usually more sustained environmental soundscape. The system is based on distributed sound emission and distributed agency controlling a moving loudspeaker system; it emphasizes how technology changes our perception of a simple everyday experience – such as walking on an outdoor site – when we listen through that technology. The triptych in the exhibition renders visible the number of times and places that “Setting” has existed as a site-specific performance, thereby emphasizing how a larger long-term conceptual idea is “conjugated” in hyper-local activations that highlight both the primary concept of sonic mediation as well as their idiosyncratic deviations from it.