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 – a play on López’s practice of blindfolding his audience during his electroacoustic performances. The piece presents a radically transformative environment in which a dense forest of panels gives rise to a highly immersive environment, having an enormous sense of scale. For my part in the project, I focused on designing a work in which the architecture itself was performed, sonically, in a very tangible way. 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 surrounds, gives rise to a very productive state of disorientation that is hard to capture on camera. This video is the best known documentation of this experience, and also shows elements of the panel designs. Special thanks to Jim de Seve for the video work.