Care is a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately – and its absence in so much of what we experience in the worlds around us (I get so sad when I see people littering in the street or on trains and busses – dont they care about the spaces they live in – are they so numb to their environment that they couldn’t give a f#%ck?).

We could think of the art experience as an extension of this idea of care (not disimilar to concepts of  ‘conviviality’ or hospitality that circulated around discussion on ‘rellational aestheics’) – coupled perhaps with some flirtation (thinking here about the careful touch of two people dancing) – or the uncontainable  of an experienced enthusiast as they share the source of their joy to a new commer or fellow affcionado (look at THIS! and THAT!). Through this contact we bring something otherwise hidden – out from eachother – and that we together bear witness to for a breif moment that we may or may not call an ‘art’ experience, a lesson, a workshop, a meeting of friends etc.

The question then changes from what we as artists are ‘interested’ in – to what specifically we care about, and how we manifest this care through our actions and foci, through the situations and exchanges we create for other people.

So for me – with this project – I’m trying to articulate how I can extend a caring and enlivening touch to other people (and myself!) through experiences that allow us to become sensitive and aroused by subtle and not so subtle qulaities of touch, movement and proprioception. To this end – I have to temper my habitual impulse towards large intense experience – with the knowledge that its not via extreme, cathartic actions that we learn to refine our capacity for sensitivy and discernment

- but on the contrary -

its only by learning to be still, and attentive to small actions/sensations that we can start to gain a deeper awareness of where we are opperating FROM.

This blog has been written fresh after listening to a wonderful concert presented as part of Liquid Architecture, and in particular – an amzing set by Asmus Tietchens that featured a truely sensual use of dynamic volumes, sounds that caressesed and wove in and our of audibility, with lilting forms that had me swaying on the edge of my seat like a snake charmer’s cobra! The delicacy of this sound was supported by the strength of the sound system (occasional use of deep bass – confidently hinting at its full potential), and the improved listening acoustics (huge curtains drawn around the space at the start of his set). This experience left me deeply touched, and determined to acheive a more considered use of sound and volume dynamics in my forthcomming interactive art show at St. Vincent’s Hospital. To create a situation where to use an analogy – the snail feels safe to venture out of it’s shell – and to extend its ommatophores (eye stalks) out of its head – and into its surrounds (in this instance – a biofeedback system that is an environment that is both inside and outside). To extend this metaphor a little further – one doesn’t get the snail to extend its eye stalks by poking them with your fingers!

As I’ve been thinking about what physical structures I’d like to explore in the upcomming workshop – its become clear to me that most of it is all to do with tilt sensing, and to a lesser extent, accelerometers, and that these sensor could be added to any number of physical actions or objects that we could be interacting with: inversion tables, swinging ropes, hoops, high-heeled shoes etc.

Garth has discussed his work on creating an open and flexible sensor-data routing system, that could allow any one connected to access whichever stream of sensor data they want, in a flexible and dynamic way.

Given the collaborative nature of our project and the workshop at Performance Space in particular – I’d like to find some ways to implement this idea, and perhaps extend it in some other ways, so we dont end up just working away in isolation th eentire time. My focus here is on having gestural/movement data  available to the entire ensemble for comment and extension/transformation – for those of us (Garth, Somaya, myself) who work with software that can use OpenSoundControl (OSC) i.e. Max, PD etc.

The idea is to have an infrastructure for us to ‘jam’  with eachother on sonification,  visualisation and analyis work:

• A central router would enable all the senor data to be shared accros the studio;
• I have a Max object that enables you to receive OSC sensor data via simple drop down menu – that’s automatically populated by the incoming data;
• I have fuzzy logic graphic interfaces for max that enable you to build fuzzy rules to track complex movements, or just map activity within specific ranges to specific sounds or whatever; and
• I’d like to build some graphing interfaces that would enable us to observe patterns in the sensor data (i.e. body movement/orientation) – and have this data projected onto the wall so its very big (4 meters high) and easy to observe, and point at, touch, etc.