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Hi, I'm Julian Stadon and I have my work, Terra(socio)sonica: Pouvoir-Puissance, commissioned
for the Dialogues With Landscape exhibition which was part of the Perth Festival.
This work was developed in collaboration with Steve Berrick who is a very talented programmer.
Basically, it's been designed to pick up silent dialogues within a set space. So looking at
the brief and responding to the brief, I was aware of the UWA Second Life environment and
my personal research is in virtual environments and the mixing of real and virtual space.
So I thought I'd respond to this brief for this exhibition by trying to create a mirrored
space between outside this gym, outside the Somerville theatre, and in a Second Life environment.
Basically what we're doing is tracking interaction within the space, be it conversations, moving
through the space. Basically any kind of interaction with that particular space is documented and
the data is taken and translated into the sounds that you can probably hear outside.
So it's run through a midi system that also outputs sound. And at the same time it's also
pipelined into Second Life where you get a 3D augmented soundscape. So basically in the
real, where you're standing, will determine where you're sound is in the virtual, so it's
kind of like a virtual echo of your existence here.
It was inspired by Bergsonism, which is a theory that this theorist Deleuze has reinterpreted
to talk about intuition, and intuition in terms of knowledge and pedagogies and things
like that. And basically this work was to set up a way of structuring an unstructured
situation. So generally we don't think about conversation as something that's so structured
and this work was trying to add a level of structure to that.
So to further engage with that kind of notion, what we've decided to do is a flash mob, taking
from that idea of flash mobs and trying to create a structured social interactions within
a defined space. So what we'll be doing is having a social symphony outside where basically
we'll be completely dictating where people stand and assigning them different instruments
etcetera so basically their movements in the space will play real instruments and hopefully
combine to make some nice music. And we're doing the same thing in Second Life also,
so we'll have consecutive real world virtual world social gatherings all blended into the
same space that is experienced through the sounds and the projections in real world and
Second Life.