description

sounds like the future creates a topography of concurrent invisible sound-spaces. Like leafing through an album of recorded memories, here one physically moves through collective cultural memories of futurisms, but abstracted and re-contextualized in the gallery. Using extracted ambient soundtracks from classic science-fiction films, the piece juxtaposes these artifacts of unattained futuristic soundings against an advanced computer system, through which the listener experiences them.

The listener can physically navigate from one soundtrack to another, by walking through the gallery space with one of three sets of wireless headphones. A computer vision and tracking system is employed, retrofitted to the existing track lighting system in the gallery. What each of the three small cameras see – the eyes of the system – delineates 3 distinct sound-spaces. Through a simple color coding system, the custom computer software is able to distinguish each set of headphones from the others, and broadcast the appropriate soundtrack to the listener when they are seen by one of the three cameras. The components required for this live mediation – computers, radio transmitters, interfaces, etc., are displayed on the gallery wall, revealing the process as it unfolds.