I am always intrigued with the concept of visual scores as everyone has a different way of breaking down sounds and expressing it with a visual medium. It translates with the theory of visual rhythm, in the way certain shapes mimic a sound in terms of it’s accent, flow and expressiveness. Tang’s approach to translating sound seem to be more of an atmospherical one where there isn’t a strict translation of a certain sound to appear as a certain motif. Instead, he uses an overarching theme to describe the sound, through the choice of medium and subject matter. The piece that describes the natural side of the story featured organic materials such as charcoal as well as fluid and free form illustrations, while the opposite featured pen ink illustration with structured patterns of lines and repeated shapes. It’s hard to tune in to a certain sound and see it’s visual representation in the piece, therefore I felt like the visual score was an accompaniment to the sound. The visual score itself was not successful in communicating the idea of the presented sound piece.

This leads to the part that did not work out for me, the lack of visual heirachy to the installation. The strongest element of the work was the way Tang manipulated the sound to express both sides of nature and the urban occupation.

Due to the multiple elements of two contrasting illustrations and physical turntables, the audience becomes distracted. Visual objects attracts a viewer’s attention from far and they would be the first to be assessed and interpreted. The illustration is already fighting for attention with the moving turntables. Both illustrations and turntable have very contrasting metaphors in terms of how it visualises the soundscape. With so many elements to a work, it is challenging for the viewer to process all of it at one go. Being in the space, I was unable to pick up that the speakers were playing two different tracks.

I found the method of which he recorded and manipulated the sound with AI fascinating and hoped that the visual cues were directed to visualising that manipulation of sound in contrast to an uncut, raw recording. This installation is a good case study on how audiences approach multi-media works and the importance of deciding what elements to include in the experience. With more visual and kinetic objects, the mind often gets distracted by it. If the emphasis of the work is in the sound and the subtleties of it, the work should have placed more importance of the communication of that element to the audience.

Social Practice Art to me is art that is being created with the aim of improving and enabling a specific audience group. The concept uses art as a medium to provide opportunities to reach out to the selected audience and work together to fulfil the decided goal. For this analysis I will be presenting about SuperHero Me, an arts organisation that uses art to empower children from less privileged backgrounds and special needs communities.

SuperHero Me runs Peekaboo! Which is an inclusive arts festival that invites artists to work with the superhero me and the children from various communities in a 5 month residency programme.  Important note is that the festival is organised by superhero me and then inviting artists to be part of the programme.

The artists are supported by a big crew of facilitators titled captains. They all are volunteers and are carefully trained to communicate and create with the children.

“Our process began with classroom observations, trainings in disability awareness and understanding children with special needs. We trained ourselves in programme, space, team and personal readiness and the inclusive arts approach, which puts the children who work with us in positions of power. We see them as equals, not beneficiaries. In fact, we have gained far more in expanding our notion of creativity, exploring new ways to connect them with the public and building our collective confidence in facilitating inclusive experiences.”

Their emphasis on empowering the children shows in the works that are created for the festival, in particular Camouflage by UYII  & The Story of the Sky by Ng Fongyee

Camouflage encouraged the participating children to create in the act of play and the prints and work were then curated into a playspace that invites other children to engage and play. The Story of the Sky presents a piece that works in particular with children that have limited mobility that are often overlooked by artists facilitators. The work weaves in technology of eye tracking to enable the children to draw by moving their heads and have their works be created into creatures of a digital sky.

The works that were presented in the festival were a testament to the organisation’s mission and goals of inclusiveness and advocacy. The works were more of a display of the experience of the 5 month residency, sharing to the audience various ways of engagement. It highlights what is required to engage with the children as equals and how the artists learn from both the children and the facilitators.  The exhibition was open to the public but only in a form of tours. The captains who led the tours shared all the experiences and stories of each exhibition, pulling the audience into the creative processes. This festival works as they present the whole residency process as the final artwork and through art, the audience learn about the methods and sensitivity involved when working with people with special abilities.

What works for a social practice work is for the organisation that works closely with their demographic to reach out to artists and art as a form of outreach, compared to artists creating a concept and then reaching out to the organisation. Often artists do not spend enough time with the targeted demographic and end up creating a work that doesn’t serve their needs and come across as a surface attempt on social work.

As much as raising awareness and exposure is the trend in social practice art recently, it does nothing if the efforts and programmes are not sustained. In Peekaboo! , the programme trains a large team of facilitators and artists that have the first hand experience and education on working with people with disabilities. It doesn’t educate a relatively large audience, but provides the resources for this group of people to be better educated and apply and share their knowledge to people around them on a daily basis.

Designing for the Digital Age

“We shape the world to suit ourselves”

The article begins with a statement of how we used to design, however with the way the world is changing, we have to be forward thinking and find a solution to cohabit with the planet we live in. Design methods that may be destructive where design practices may not be ethical or environmentally sustainable. Not only in the final product but the process of prototyping and product testing. In the age of environmental degradation and dwindling natural resources, we have to keep the environment in mind when designing, understanding how much resources will be required when the product is in place and how they will exist in the world after the are created, used and disposed. Products created with “environmentally friendly products” or creating products that last a lifetime and thus reducing waste?

Designers should train themselves to understand the workflow of the builder, hearing their needs and concerns and keeping them in mind when designing a product. Can you translate the imagery into a physical prototype? In what medium works best to describe the form and features of the product to the builder? The builder is unable to see inside your mind, thus you are required to understand their language and translate your thoughts into a common language.

Designing beyond yourself extends into the reading’s introduction to Alan Cooper’s Goal Directed Design. “we can design every aspect of the environment to encourage an optimal experience, but since each person brings her own attitudes, behaviours, and perceptions to any situation, no designer can determine exactly what experience someone has”  With goal directed design, personas are created to emulate the behaviours and responses of various target audiences. Although it may seem to be all inclusive theoretically, I feel that it is almost impossible to categorize a whole population of users into a few channels of traits. The dynamics of certain categories may function and behave differently in a community at the other side of the globe due to cultural and contextual differences. Designers have to accept that when they create a product, it may reach beyond the community they serve and keep that in mind when creating.

Social Practice Art

The article begins with a sentiment that I agree so strongly with. Why do artists “recreate” a situation of a social issue with intention of “creating awareness” when that is not what the community in mind requires? What does awareness even do to an audience if they can have the same information fed to them through various other mediums of media? Social Art is mostly still exhibited in commercial galleries where all the talks and the money circulates between the art collectors and the artists, using the targeted community just as a talking point.

This sentiment was brought up again in the article where the patron list for the Project Row Houses listed big companies such as the Bank of America which are one of the roots contributing to the housing issues in that community. Big companies use these non-profit, for community programmes as a PR opportunity to fulfil their Corporate Social Responsibility agendas. Instead of the companies supporting the goal by fixing the problems the contribute to it, they use the image of donating and supporting such causes to show their “support and belief” into the programme. Why would you invest money into a programme that is helping the people who are suffering but not use the money to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Art as a social practice is a big trend as audiences have their opinions swayed easily in the social justice era of the internet. Social practice pieces have the power to spread through the internet at an alarming speed through social media platforms like facebook, twitter, youtube etc. Artists recognise the power of the internet and often use it as a tool for support and backing, as people are generally moved by a powerful image. With more eyes on the work, your name as an artist grows and the potential of breaking into the commercial market also increases. Creating work for a social cause growingly becomes a trend and the question of it’s sincerity comes into the picture.

How much does an artist actually care and give to a community if they can be all for a single social cause for one work, but be talking about a totally different situation in the next month?

Cymatics is a vibrational phenomena that consist of visual waves that are formed by the movement of sound waves through a medium. This is a term that was coined by Hans Jenny (1904 – 1972) and still continuously explored in the current times in the search of expanding the visualisation of sound. The most prominent experiment was the physical formations of cymatics by Ernst Chaldni as displayed below.

These formations were created by placing sand on top of a metal sheet and the metal was stroked with a violin bow. The frequency created by the vibration from the bow was translated both into sound and into physical sand formations that are organic and mathematical at the same time.

Throughout the talk Evan Grant introduces the idea of how there is data in everything we see and interact with, and how Cymatics is a first step in accessing that data. We can now visualise the frequencies of sound into a tangible and pictorial form. He introduces current applications of this research in forms of oceonography where scientists are capturing sonic records created by  dolphins and how it’s being recorded as language.

Cymatics is a factual and accountable approach in visualising sound, however it is limited in terms of it’s ability to express the human cognition of sound. Sound and emotion is still a phenomena that is extremely hard to visualise. Sounds we hear on a daily basis is a mash up of multiple frequencies and tones that create complicated structures that hold various positive and negative emotions. That being said, classifying a sound to an emotion isn’t a natural cognition but a constant conditioning of our experiences and daily interactions. I personally feel conflicted with the ideal of visualising sound as it’s a highly subjective experience. Often certain visuals can bring out the idea of a sound more accurately than the cymatic representation of the same sound. With the emergent of sound artists and music visualisation techniques, I look forward in seeing the gap between factual/mathematical visualisation and expressive visualisation close in as we try to unpack the magic of sound and it’s visual language.