Abstract
Maelstrom is a spatial instrument and audio-driven installation. Guided by responsive and repetitive musical patterns in chaos, we navigate the vortex of sensory overload. Audio guides movement and movement reshapes audio – the interactive music progression unfolds as a spatial structure for all sensory elements, augmenting cognition and decision.
Description
How does spatial medium convey non-textual languages through the depth of musical pattern? How do we survive in the chaotic environment of nowadays sensory overload and embrace the uncertain future? How does music inspire new perspective on new relationship between humanity and technology? Maelstrom is a spatial instrument and audio-visual installation performed by the audience. It offers a means to navigate the whirlpool of overwhelming messages by providing an accessible audio-driven pattern recognition tool. Based on habits and memories of the past, the tool helps users to reorient themselves through recursive patterns of sound and visual in space, to further take decisive and mutual impacts on the ever-evolving environment. By challenging the capabilities and perceptive process of human brain, it critiques the accessibility of art and technology for blind person, challenging sensory hierarchy of the prevailing ocular-centric culture.
Marshall McLuhan recognized parallels of today to Edgar Allan Poe’s novel “A Descent into the Maelström” – when a sailor gets caught in a maelstrom, by observing the pattern of objects in the vortex and grabbing onto the recurring ones, he finally escaped the chaotic situation. As a sailor of today, we are living in a world filled with overloading messages generated by interfaces and digital technologies. The instrument ‘Maelstrom’ presents a journey through such multi-sensory vortex, showing new perspectives upon the humanity and technologies by drawing attention to the mental wellness in such situation. Guided by predictable musical patterns in turbulence, we navigate through a landscape of maps transformed by interactive AI generation, in which memories and habits allow us to adapt to the ever-evolving environment.
Immersed in projection and spatial audio, audience tweaks a controller to move in the soundscape from chaotic center of the overwhelming vortex, to outer boundary of dim acoustic space. Audio informs movement and movement reshapes audio – with our innovative spatial music framework, the project delivers a user-performed multi-branch music structure, exploring beyond sonification, audio-spatialization and visualization. It interprets musical progression as a spatial-temporal logic of all sensory elements, offering decision and cognition support.
Beyond traditional sonification, it explores more meaningful and responsive audio experience driven by human-centric data generative environments. Meanwhile, for data visualization and sonification, it criticizes the existing mindset of “producing complexity” – most related explorations tend to create rich experience that disconnects the result with the meaning and characteristics of data, causing perceptive issues. Our project is not aimed to offer an answer to related research, but also to present an inspiring vision and innovative tool of fine tuning our relationship to technologies and messages within our perceivable surroundings.
Project Video
