Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to find other examples similar to my desired project. Although I haven’t found any, as of yet, that are completely identical to what I wish to do (as I now know mine is more unique than I originally thought) I have found some installations and festivals that fall around the same concept and end goal.
I first came across an exhibition that was held at The National Gallery in London, July to September 2015. The exhibition commissioned musicians from all types of sound art backgrounds, this list including: DJ, producer and Mercury-Prize winner Jamie XX from the successful The XX, Susan Philipsz OBE, a Turner-Prize winner who is known for her work on installations linking music and architecture, and Nico Muhly, a orchestral composer heavily involved in ballet and opera. For this they had to choose a painting and compose a piece of music in response to it. This is, in a way, almost opposite to how I am going about my piece, as I am creating the soundscape and then creating a painting in response to it/as I go along. This is something quite fascinating to me as my plan and desire is to create an art piece in reflection to the composition I myself will create, however these artists are composing to pieces of art that are hundreds of years old and not their own work. The point of the exhibition is to get viewers to “hear the painting, see the sound” so the musicians and sound artists had to work hard to create a connection not only between the composition and the piece of art, but also to the audience.
Another example I came across was the 2016 Electronic Literature Organisation International Conference and Media Art Festival. They invited theorists and practitioners to explore the point of the conference and festival, which is to consider sound as a form of literature. They asked them to explore this through a wide spread variety of different media, such as sound walks, sound collages, field recordings and, the one most important to me, soundscapes. It was to encourage them to think about storytelling through sound sources rather than the human voice. No screens, no talking, just sound sources and sound effects, or even silence to tell a narrative “designed for careful listening experiences”. Although this does not relate to my project in the sense of the art piece I will be creating along side it, it does relate in the narrative area; the attempt to create an emotional connection, to create a story that the listener becomes engaged and invested in.
Both of these examples relate to each other heavily on the narrative and connection aspect. For a piece to be successful, whether it be as part of an exhibition or an online forum, a connection, a feeling, has to be made between said piece and the listener/viewer.
References:
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/soundscapes
http://elo2016.com/festival/sound-installations/
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