Revealing and Sonifying Living Capsules
Information
ENG
Living Capsules is the umbrella name we give to our art pieces. These are being born out of an ongoing cross-disciplinary collaboration between haptic and sound artists and a sociologist who share interests in the relations between senses, bodies, and technologies. In this workshop we reflect on how we are blending our practices through material and sensory engagements. In doing so we share some of our recent research together.
Our workshop would be presented in two parts. First we will enter a conceptual space of biohybrid and biofabricated systems of the future. Encountering the critical question: how might we come to live with Living Machines? We will reflect on our process of revealing that guided our explorations, generating new data from biomaterials that we sonified. We shall experiment with modes of listening and hearing with immersive audio practices.
Secondly, we will teach some sonification techniques that we used to bring new life to our biomaterials. You will have the opportunity to create sounds, individually or in groups, using the diversity of data collected - or working with pre-given sets.
During the workshop we will create sound pieces as Living Capsules. We will listen to, and hear, these work-in-progress pieces together at the end of the workshop. The idea of our sonified Living Capsules is to express futures where data and machines differently inhabit or intimately relate to our bodies. The aim of this experiment is to disrupt how our audiences sense technology as living and/or non-living and critically reflect on body–technology–society relations, both now and in the future.
---------
Joana Burd is an artist, educator and researcher of haptic aesthetics and sound art. She is collaborating as Honorary Research Assistant at the UCL Knowledge Lab working as a collaborator on the project, ‘Biohybrid Bodies: a sociological framework for living with Living Machines’. Joana is currently writing up her PhD research at Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat de Barcelona, where she is also working as lecturer. Joana has presented seven solo exhibitions, in the past year she exhibited her work in London (UCL, RCA), SBCAST (Santa Barbara, CA, USA), RIW (Rio de Janeiro) and Atelie397/Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo). http://en.joanaburd.com
Ned Barker is a sociologist of technology and the body based at the UCL Knowledge Lab. He is currently PI of ‘Biohybrid Bodies: a sociological framework for living with Living Machines’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (web: https://biohybridbodies.wordpress.com – twitter: @BiohybridB). As an experienced ethnographer Ned combines sensory, creative, and collaborative methods to explore the complex relations between body, technology, and society. His recent publications contribute to each of these areas and include: An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness, Interactive Skin Through a Social–Sensory Speculative Lens (with Jewitt & Steimle), and A Collaborative Research Manifesto! An Early Career response to uncertainties (with 14 colleagues).
Nikolas Gomes is a sound artist and musician currently based in Lisbon studying a Masters in Production and Technologies of Sound at Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias. His work deals mostly with the intersection of musical production and sound art, looking to push the boundaries between these two fields. As a self-taught programmer and DIY enthusiast, he focuses his research on the development of interactive audiovisual devices that can present new ways of interacting with sonic materials. Through them, he hopes to bring people closer to technology-based artworks.