Outside In: Toronto transforms Yonge-Dondas Square into a live electronic instrument and participatory sound installation. Microphones will pick up the soundscape of the city square—which will be processed and projected back into the square over the main loudspeakers as an uncanny reflection of itself. The installation, which will run throughout the day in between the performances on the main stage, will also be activated by other pre-recorded audio artifacts as well as sounds of musicians—or anyone else who chooses to interact with the system and “play the square.” Juxtaposing the live sound with its mediated (fragmented, distorted, echoed) virtual copy, festival attendees and passers-by will experience Yonge-Dondas Square as an intersection between the live and the virtual.
Screenshot of the Live Processing patch under development using the software Max. This new patch is a branch of the the multi-effects processor “Sizzling Egos” which I use in other works (Wood, Fake Radiolab). Several additional effects (audio Flybys, Cutouts, Dropins, Jump Cuts, Shuffling, etc) are being added for this new version, to interact in more interesting ways with the city soundscape.
Google Maps Satellite view of YDS (Yonge-Dondas Square) with
potential microphone locations.
sound installation for a familiar space
Outside In
Outside In: Home was created for the Stanford CCRMA 2021 workshop on Distributed Arts Collective, organized by Alex Chechile and Constantin Basica. For this project, Chechile and Basica asked participants to reflect on the many ways our homes had transformed during the Pandemic, often inverting or eliding oppositions between public/private, home/work, as we daily invited colleagues, family, friends, and strangers in to our homes via zoom. The prompt, then, was to transform our home space into an art space: to find ways to reclaim, or intentionally reactivate our homes through the networked new media, without being determined by that media.
During the live performance of Outside In: Home audience members in the zoom chat watched the livestream from my house. They were encouraged to talk and and share stories during the performance; their audio was transmitted to my computer at home, processed, and distributed to 8 speakers/speaker objects (traditional loudspeakers, also drums and a thundersheet used as resonators) which were spread across different rooms, upstairs and downstairs at my home.
This video combines documentation of the live networked performance as well as other audio and video clips produced during the workshop.