CHArt TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Digital Archive Fever
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J Milo Taylor, London College of Communication, London, UK
‘Immersion’ An Interactive Archive of Sound Art
Contemporary society offers new opportunities for interaction, involvement and community building. Sound, as a natural phenomenon, and medium of artistic practice, remains immersive, sensual, and elusive to capture by language. Conceptual modalities established by Internet practice and post-structuralist philosophy suggest innovative methods of organising and presenting cultural resources. This paper will present current Ph.D. research being undertaken at the Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice Research Unit (CRiSAP), University of the Arts London.
Discourse surrounding sound art deals with a profoundly divergent set of artists; work ranges from Italian Futurism, to Surrealism, Dada, John Cage and Fluxus to Pierre Schaefer’s musique concrète and the electronic innovations of Stockhausen. The subsequent generation of artists developed sound installations, video art and site-specific sound sculptures. Technologies were explored, deconstructed and used in ways unintended by their designers. Later, industrial artists and their contemporaries further developed an art of sound which then underwent a significant expansion in the digital age with the availability of affordable devices for the recording, organisation and presentation of soundworks.
The focus of the work is the development of an interactive and immersive digital environment. The work is currently investigating the potential of Web 2.0 technologies, specifically XML, Ajax, MySQL and X3D. The application at its core is a dynamic database allowing rich semantic manipulations of digitised cultural objects, a methodology that allows visitors the chance to deconstruct, compare and contrast previously unconnected practice in an enriched multi-sensory, audiovisual environment.
This presentation will introduce some theoretical underpinnings of the work, informed by such people as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault and Lev Manovich. It will also discuss the working methodology and deliver a demonstration of the work in progress which should be of interest to anyone working with concepts of the digital archive, audience involvement and the potentialities of digital knowledge.