BRUCE MOWSON

Birdland is an immersive sound work that uses gaming software to create sound spaces that the user can move within, as if flying through and around sounds in a space. It is inspired by sound installation artworks that create physical zones of sound in rooms, such as the classic works of Alvin Lucier and La Monte Young. A prototype version of the work was presented at the Time Transcendence Performance conference. 

The project was supported by a seed-funding grant from the Intervention through Art program at the RMIT Design Research Institute. Thanks to Firelight Technologies for software support!

Download: FMOD Sandbox (required software, modified version, 13.5mb)

Download: Lines2 (project files and instructions) 47mb (smaller download coming April 2010!)

<top>

PhD by research project, RMIT School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne, 2005-2008.

ABSTRACT

 This project aims to produce new material and understandings about audio/visual installation art and immanence. Immanence describes a subjective state that emphasises an embodied sense in time and space. It is explored in the project artworks by using materials and techniques that heighten one’s sense of being a receptor – of seeing and hearing, rather than being an identity formed in language. The research works through the derivation of my notion of immanence from my environmental listening experiences. I have used artistic and philosophical material to aid and extend these concepts in relation to their investigation through the practical works.

 The research is conducted using non-linear audio/visual technologies to create installation art works that elude narrative sequencing through generative techniques. Typically this involves a computer generated image and sound, projected into space in ways that seek to heighten the audience’s sense of embodiment. These works are non-repetitive, and close attention to the materials reveals a structure of non-hierarchical variation, and of continual change. Philosophically, this emphasises immanent notions of the self as being in a state of becoming – of being simultaneously complete in the present moment yet continually in change.

 The research explores and reveals a number of outcomes and shifts of position. At a technical level, a number of ways of combining generative sound and image are explored, and methods for creating variation within a continuum are implemented. A number of presentations of the works are made in installation spaces, and these document the tension between the framed format of video and the immersive and surrounding embodiment which is activated in installation practice.

Download full exegesis (900kb)

<top>

Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the Totally Huge New Music Festival, 2009.

Abstract.

This essay considers the act of listening as situated by philosophies of immanence, psychoanalysis and musical practices, with a view to discussing issues of sensation, experience, time and immersion. The main body of the text consists of a subjective theoretical preface to issues of immanence with respect to aesthetic perception, before concluding with a discussion of immanence in US Minimalism since the 1960s. The piece draws on the work of various authors, notably Gilles Deleuze, whose perspective on immanent perception in the moment might be opposed to the historical and symbolic model implied by Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis. The essay explores a case for a phenomenological approach to aesthetics and composition, in which materialist concerns—that is to say sound as matter with which to provoke (pure) sensation—are privileged over representation, where in the latter case sound and music largely acts as a vehicle for meaning. Although not specifically focussed on the sound/image relationship, this essay derives from my thinking about my own audiovisual practice, one of these pieces being exhibited in the Festival. Though the discussion focuses upon sound, it has implications for both image and sound/image relationships.

http://research.waapamusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/totallyhugebook1.pdf

<top>