Blindfield (2011)

This piece arose from a unique collaboration: I was asked to co-instruct a course at RPI which brought together architecture and media arts students. I then invited sound artist Francisco López to collaborate with myself, co-instructor Michael Oatman and the 16 students on a large scale sound project. The result was Blindfield – the name being a play on López’s practice of blindfolding his audience during his electroacoustic performances, and the architectural scale at which we were working. The piece presents a radically transformative environment in which a dense forest of panels in very low lighting conditions gives rise to a highly immersive environment that is led by subtle light and diffuse sonic qualities, having an enormous sense of scale. For my part in the project, I focused on designing a work in which the architecture itself could be performed, sonically, in a very tactile, diffuse, spatialized manner that would provide a beautiful sense of spatial-sonic blurring. We achieved this through a design of speaker-objects driven by inexpensive transducers and constructed from MDF wood and opaque fabrics. The play of light and sound, as one adjusts to their surroundings, gives rise to a very productive state of disorientation that (as is typical with sound installations) was hard to capture on camera.

The below video is the only known documentation of this experience, and also shows elements of the panel designs.