A piece that combines Wave Field Synthesis and volumetric lighting to create sound holograms that pair with projection caught in haze.
This is a piece in progress that I plan to debut in 2025. It is inspired by the George Sonnabend exhibit shown at the Museum of Jurassic Technology located in Culver City, CA.
The piece is a room sized installation that uses a 48-channel speaker array to create sound holograms at locations where volumetric light paths cross. This piece continues my ongoing exploration into Wave Field Synthesis (WFS).
The past year I have been discovering the most effective timbres and methods of recreating sounds with WFS with my last project being a WFS installation created for the High Desert Soundings experimental sound festival in 29 Palms, CA.
This piece also continues my exploration of memory and processes that degrade and simulate the reformation of memories in the form of "sound events." These concepts combine well with George Sonnabend's "Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter". In Sonnabend's description of memory he states that "there is only experience and decay" and posited a theory of forgetting that uses experience planes and cones of confabulations to illustrate this decay.
“We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events.”
Memory Planes will attempt to recreate this Model of Obliscence using Fresnel lenses, volumetric lighting, Wave Field Synthesis, and multiple projectors.
~update~
I installed this piece as part of a sound art residency at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. There were two installs, one on their Ansan campus and another in Seoul at their Namsan campus. The second install involved minor tweaks to programming. While the installation was well received, there are a few things that am experimenting with in response to the two installs.
The first is the projector position. The two side projectors were set perpendicular to the Fresnel lens, as originally conceived. I found that it was difficult to produce projection based holograms using projectors due to their projector black and due to the space required in the room. I also noticed that the main draw of the piece lie on how the Fresnel lens affected the incoming projection.
I am experimenting with an alternate position where all three projectors can map onto the lens but at differing angles. I believe there is some interesting work in manipulating the projected light in response to how the Fresnel lens warps the differing angles.
The second is the sound. While the FM synthesis sounds are suitable they are not yet fully telling the story of how memories reform over time. A modification of these sounds along with additional granular voice processing would better express the intent of the piece.
My next install will be in my garage as a means to share this with my community and also allow for further iteration.
