Through critical design this work attempts to locate northampton, as a construct, within the walls of a nineteenth-century boot and shoe factory standing empty in the centre of the town. the inquiry places the building at the meta-geographical centre of the town — a point of activity or non-activity metaphorically representing northampton through three phases in its use. firstly, as a centre for thriving trade (1896), as boot and shoe factory, manufacturing within a worldwide market. secondly, as a place of emptiness and degradation (approx. 2000), as vacant production space, following the movement of industry away from the factory and part conversion of the building to open-plan apartment blocks. thirdly and most recently, as a place for immigrant populations, as community centre for the al-iman society of northamptonshire (a group established by swahili speaking muslims, 2009), a space for social activities and education currently awaiting council approval following complaints from local residents and far-right political opposition.

The inquiry is a work-in-progress (begun in 2006); open-ended and on-going with no singular fixed outcome or planned date for completion. as well as an inquiry in itself, it is treated as a test-bed: a place for developing design methodologies and approaches to describing and mapping out places though sound and image; their roles and histories, with these prototyped approaches applied elsewhere in related works.

The works produced to date collate elements of sonic, photographic, written and video studies; primers of speculative outcomes (book; video; projections etc). at this point in the work however, the inquiry itself remains more important than the idea of resolved outcomes.

NOISE<>SIGNAL (sound)

Using alphabets constructed from sound-based information (sine waves; MIDI), custom software applications are written that source, collate and translate internet-based text feeds into self-creating real-time acousmatic ‘textscapes’. This study seeks to challenge our connections with everyday information (news stories; spam emails), translating the useless into something useful, or vice versa. The work attempts to question the position of the designer within inter-media works, moving toward a role of designer as technician rather than creator, through the manufacturing of design templates and rules which produce the work within defined extents, rather than producing the work itself. In addition, they are attempts to give a creative voice to largely silent, invisible or static information, liberating it with an authorial role, making decisions about how, when, and what is created, displayed and ultimately communicated.

The attempt at producing an interface or template as opposed to the work itself is a key aspect within the research: similar to the notions of kinetic art (sculpture etc), there is no work without the influence of an external factor. In the case of kinetic art this may be wind or the intervention of the viewer, but in the case of this work the external forces are text-based: the reported events from around the world being distributed in real-time by way of the internet.

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RECTO-VERSO is an outcome from an ongoing and open-ended enquiry into the use of appropriated sources as ingredients for the formation of new-media works. Potentially producing unique sounds indefinitely, in this work text and images are constantly collected from frequently updated internet news pages through a series of automated processes, and projected as abstracted sonic languages through (potentially) any number of channels.

The work can be discussed in two parts: the first outlining the methodologies and processes behind the design and construction of a ‘template’ digital environment that produced this work (and several other similar outcomes), and the second looking at its specific applications in the making of RECTO-VERSO.

1. MACHINE (REAL TO DIGITAL)

The design of the environment, or machine, used in the formation of this body of work is a work-in-progress. By the nature of new media art and design and the tools being used, it will expand and develop over time as part of an open-ended discussion with, and use of, appropriated ‘information’ (texts (letters and numbers), and images (moving and still)) as a kind of code or fuel to drive the creation of multimedia works.

The work poses the question: how can we engage or ‘plug into’ the real world and use it as a controlling factor in the digital world? It attempts to question the position of the designer / artist within new media works, moving towards a role of ‘designer as technician’ rather than creator, through the manufacturing of digital machines which produce the work within defined extents. In addition, it is an attempt to give a creative ‘voice’ to otherwise largely unused information, empowering it with an author’s role in the work, making decisions about how and what is created, displayed and communicated.

Perhaps more importantly, the work attempts to challenge our relationships with everyday information such as word and image on the internet, and how technology allows both a shift and convergence of roles and mediums, giving new levels of engagement and communication.

The attempt at producing an interface as opposed to the work itself is central to the investigation: similar to the properties of kinetic art (sculptures etc), there is no work without the influence of an external factor. In the case of kinetic art this may be wind or the movement of the viewer, but in the case of this body of work the external forces are the everyday life happenings around the world, being recorded and distributed in real-time by way of the internet through word and image. The work produced through this process is both interactive in the sense that it responds to an input, created by human hands (the information on the internet) and generative in that the outcome is largely uncontrollable by the designer, moreover the listener.

Using an open-source application (in this case the Pd interface, by Miller Puckette) to create this environment as custom-built software is central to the ideals behind the work, given that one of the key characteristics of open-source software: the reliance on a collaboration with an online community, also underpins what is being produced: work reliant on an interaction with internet-based information. So in this instance, the nature of the tools, their fragility and almost ‘user-unfriendly’ interfaces, are embraced within the work they produce.

2. RECTO-VERSO (HEARING ‘RE:’)

Recorded in response to a call for entries to a book arts exhibition (Northampton, May 2008), RECTO-VERSO was an attempt at a representation of written and visual content in a 4-dimensional non-visual space: a gallery environment over a period of several weeks.

In this work, the theme of the exhibition, ‘Re:’, was used as a keyword to automatically and repeatedly search internet news sites for articles containing the word ‘re’ in its title. Following a series of automated algorithmic processes, the text and images returned by the searches became new abstracted sonic languages, projected through 2 channels - the RECTO (right channel: words) and the VERSO (left channel: images).

The sounds produced for RECTO draw on areas of past enquiries into the meeting point of typography and sound, the most significant being the design of a typeface - SOUND ALPHABET - through which letter forms were drawn and shaped with stereo sound waves, allowing words to be ‘written’ with sound. This typeface allowed further questions and exploration into the potential use of accurate and accountable sound-based methods (alphabetic sine waves) in communicating complex written information in new ways - in this case news articles as sound - and challenge the boundaries between visual and sonic methods of representing written information.

In RECTO-VERSO, the news articles returned by a linked sequence of RSS, PHP, HTML and applescript applications are read by the computer within the digital environment and written in real-time using varied versions of the SOUND ALPHABET typeface, giving a constant and streaming abstracted presentation of ‘re’ within online news communities.

Similar to the sounds produced for RECTO, VERSO refers to past investigations into the possibilities of representing images as sound in accurate ways. A number of conceptual and literal conversions take place with the image, reducing it to the most basic of informations (numbers, for example) relating to size, shape, colour, resolution etc, which become a language with which to create sound, dictating the composition of sine waves etc. Although abstracted and unrecognisable as ‘image’, the sounds are facsimiles of the original information, expressed through a different medium.

Despite the seemingly atonal quality of the sound, the work attempts a kind of spatial narrative and reportage in a gallery setting, with potentially hundreds of sonically different and abstracted portraits of language being spoken or written at once. At the point of recording however, the sound becomes a temporal account, or snapshot, of news and global happenings at the time of capture.

THE POINT OF CENTRE presents a place archetypal of all others (Northampton). Through four short films and a series of sound works (sound, song, poetry), the work combines reportage with creative image-making, displaying a narrative of modern life at the centre of the United Kingdom. Each film explores four spaces with key features of the changing town: travel and transport; health and closures; trade and culture; transient populations and death.

Designed within a bespoke multimedia software environment, the spaces are described through spatial and temporal montages, embracing deliberate abstraction and differing interpretations.