ETHOS

I am a people watcher and that is why interaction is the focus and drive of my work. I feel over time physical interaction between people has significantly reduced. With Modern culture first closing down the doors of communal living, into our own personal worlds, everything at hands reach; personal computers; personal MP3 players; even to the extent of personal robotic pets. From there the doors began to reopen, but interaction as we knew it refreshed; a middle man is now required, ‘The Device’. I would agree that change and progress is important, but as I see it we are not gaining new skills, we are replacing. them. Physical interaction is comparatively rare to those of ‘the device’, and slowly we are loosing the ability to communicate to our previous level, creating age barriers of those before and after ‘the device’.


During the 3rd stage of ISD course I would like to design events which encourage physical interaction as I feel passionately about creating design for change, with my aims to bring back the community, whether that be through town planning or interventions which provoke a reaction and discussion. I am particularly keen on temporary structures and installations which pop up in busy places, as this opens them up for the ‘everyday’ person to see and often is a catalyst for discussion, inevitably flowing into the device interaction ; the news, networking and photo sharing internet sites, therefore creating a worldwide critic on just one persons vision.


I want to further my understanding of the context of space and abstraction of space, therefore allowing my work to become stronger and enable me to push my passion for creating discussion and physical interaction between young people.

Saturday, 30 April 2011

Xenakis and Le Corbusier - Architect of Sound.

Poème électronique (English Translation: "Electronic Poem") is a piece of electronic music by composer Edgard Varèse, written for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The Philips corporation commissionedLe Corbusier to design the pavilion, which was intended as a showcase of their engineering progress. Corbusier came up with the title Poème électronique, saying he wanted to create a "poem in a bottle". Varèse composed the piece with the intention of creating a liberation between sounds and as a result uses noises not usually considered "musical" throughout the piece.






Varèse designed a very complex spatialization scheme which was synchronized to the film. Prefiguring the acousmonium style of sound projection, hundreds of speakers were controlled by sound projectionists with a series of rotary telephone dials. Each dial could turn on five speakers at a time out of a bank of 12. Many estimates of the pavilion's sound system go as high as 450 speakers, but based on the limitations of the switching system and the number of projectionists used, an estimate of 350 seems more reasonable. The speakers were fixed to the interior walls of the pavilion, which were then coated in asbestos. The resulting appearance was of a series of bumps. The asbestos hardened the walls, creating a cavernous acoustic space.
The spatialization scheme exploited the unique physical layout of the pavilion. The speakers stretched up to the apex of Corbusier's points, and Varèse made great use of the possibilities, sending the sound up and down the walls.[1]



I feel the experience documented in the above clip of Poème électronique achieves the aims of Expanded cinema. It addresses the live context of watching and transforming cinema's historical and cultural architectures of reception into a site of cinematic experience in a perforative style. Creating a multilayered spatialised experience. I would like to achieve this same spatial experience through the multilaying of sound recordings - creating a new platform to understand the Thames lifecycle.
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