2016 interactive audiovisual installation

This was the Sonic Poem pitch back in 2015:

Sonic Poem is an interactive sound installation that transposes sound artist Kok Siew-Wai’s improvisational vocal techniques onto the phonological properties of the alphabet. These properties are then engaged with through the participant’s expressions. To interact with the installation, the participant types something into a keyboard interface. Each letter has a sonic representation which, when the poem is completed, is transformed into an audio/visual collage that corresponds to the sum of the letters pressed, or a ‘sonic poem’.

The Sonic Poem opening at Space.Toccata. A radio interview on the installation with BFM Malaysia can be found here

I’d met Goh Lee Kwang during a 2015 art residency in Kuala Lumpur. He is impossibly creative and relaxed all at once. I immediately enjoyed his company and he was generous in giving his time as disparate events oscillated around him (he was coordinating an art event in a mall while we met). Lee Kwang, SGFA intern Flo Simpson and I went to a gig together at Findars (now RAW Artspace), where I saw Kok Siew-Wai perform. I think Sonic Poem had been floating around in my head for a while and started to put things together when I returned to NZ. Siew-Wai was keen to collaborate, and things started to come together.

The starting point of the piece is the proposition that language is a conditioned response to stimuli. I am seeking to engage with how we respond to stimuli when no such response exists. This personally interests me as someone who is monolingual and comes from a largely monolingual environment. Therefore, when I am engaging in an environment with a multilingual framework, I am subject to this response system.

I would also like the piece to facilitate an exploration of how cognition determines the interpretation of phonetic concepts. I want to explore an interrelated impression that improvised sound, experimental sound, sound art etc, extends beyond the organisation of sound, and into the organisation of thought. Under this proposition, a sound is an abstraction from the properties which make it quantifiable, e.g. amplitude, frequency. Under this proposition, each phonetic iteration of a letter or word has a distinct phonological system to each participant in the installation. To put it more generally, I am interested in exploring the ‘subjectivity’ of sound as it relates to language.

And in a broader sense, we are exposed to an increasingly pithy language system as our world expands in an ever digital direction, and our consumer culture pollinates with environments that were not previously considered legitimate marketplaces; for example, social and political communications. This language system is something that the piece explores through the deconstruction of phonological properties. I would like the absence of this system to reflect an arbitrariness of its communicative role in the presence of the sounds themselves.