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Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound

Winner, “Best Visual Arts” prize, Wellington Fringe Festival, 2007

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Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound is an interactive immersive installation. It converts any space into a playful environment for the exploration of sound and light. With little prompting, visitors to the space find themselves dancing, moving, and ’spazzing out’ (as some said in February 2007), as their motion becomes intuitively connected to the sound they are hearing and the light they are seeing. The artwork presents an individual experience for each individual, operating a collaborative relationship between artist, technology and participant.

Physically, an interior space, access to which is physically and psychologically disconnected from ordinary reality by way of neglected service entrances, utilitarian maintenance corridors, and finally darkness, is augmented with sensory technology and light and audio producing equipment, so that within it, additional spatial dimensions take form through light and sound.

Having passed through the neglected service entry and utilitarian maintenance corridors that make up the entrance, upon arriving to the actual space of the artwork, the visitor is immediately aware they have entered somewhere where the normal rules of vision and hearing do not apply. The slightest movement within the space causes audible changes (changes to the synthesized soundscape) and visible changes (dramatic changes in the colour and intensity of the lighting of the space). Audiences soon discover that the rules underlying the relationships between their movement and these aural and visual changes can only be learnt by experimentation and play.

Furthermore, the system is sufficiently sensitive, and the movement < -> sound < -> light mappings are sufficiently intuitive, that visitors to the installation find themselves able to perform the space as if it were a musical instrument after just a few minutes of experimentation. The physical isolation of the darkened space frees visitors from any social pressure, any sense that they are being watched, and so they feel able to act in as free a way as they wish.

Visual documentation of this project has proven extremely difficult to obtain. The artwork itself exists in the connection between the audience/user and the technology, developing moment-by-moment as the user/audience movement is converted into light and sound. As such only limited visual documentation material is available.

Go back to the main Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound project page.