Radio Streams
Enaction in Arts, Enactive 07. 18th -24th Nov, '07.

With the advent of web radio, the world of the geographically situated broadcast limited by the power of the transmission network of a station, is becoming a thing of the past. Now you can have radio stations from anywhere streamed to your desktop. While this is undoubtedly a wonderful listening experience, something of the mystery of the radio broadcast and its dependence on the geography and physics of our little world has been lost.

In Radio Streams, the listener is returned to the world of the earth-bound broadcasting network, by using web radio to stream content into a spherical listening space. Using a hand-held compass, augmented with motion sensors, the 'listener' can probe the earth's radio content. As an 'active' listener, it is possible to search the space for music, news and comment and even to juxtapose diverse representations of world events in a shared acoustic space.

with Sile O'Modhrain

Cross-Pollination
Opening SARC, Sonic Labm Thursday 13th Sept

To appear at Catalyst Arts, 26th - 29th November 2007.

Cross-Pollination is part of a series of installations exploring emergent and chaotic systems. It employs audio feedback as a driving mechanism and relies on indeterminate input from the environment to act as a catalyst for interaction.

Video footage of 'Cross-Pollination' in SARC's Sonic Lab

13.7MB Download

CycleSonic
Premiered at 'Bring the Noise', in assoication with Catalyst Arts & The Belfast Festival at Queens.

Monday 16th – Sunday 29th October
CycleSonic helps to reconnect us to our sonic environment by introducing the Bicycle as a noise-making device par excellence.
Through the use of guitar pickups, feedback and over amplification the Bicycle and its surrounding environment take on a new sonic identity. The Bicycle itself not only becomes an instrument in is own right but also an electrostatic receiver, possibly decoding messages from the cosmos!

Download Video 15.9MB

'Excuse Me ?'

Installation premiered at ICAD 2006.

'Excuse Me ?' is an installation built around ideas of embodied social creativity. Agents listening to their environment try and recreate their aural stimuli through a matching process between feature extraction of incoming audio to their own internal database of sounds. Errors in matching and a limited but up dateable internal database lead to a miscommunication between the agents and their environment which allows for a evolving sonic structure to occur.

Video footage of 'Excuse Me' in SARC's Sonic Lab 13.7MB Download

Natural Selection

Premiered at Música Viva Festival in Portugal (17th - 24th Sept 2005) Natural Selection is an installation designed to exhibit emergence through a carefully selected natively sonic emergent environment based on the frog ecology of mate selection within a frog chorus. Special consideration is given in the design of this installation to the notion that the phenomenon of emergence is manifest in the dynamic listening system of a perceiver embodied within such an environment.

Photos from Portugal

Download Movie from Portugal 5.5 MB

Download Movie from Sonic Lab 6.1 MB

Full Installation Description

Installation at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast

I was asked to contribute an interactive soundscape as part of the installation at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. 14 people were asked to contribute 10 words which they thought best described their own hospital experiences. These words are then played back in a different order depending on user interaction. The words from different people thus combine in random patterns producing new meanings and hopefully broadening peoples opinions of the hospital environment.

Project home page

The Beat Jigsaw (with Gavin Morris)

The Beat Jigsaw is a jigsaw puzzle which the user can play with to create music and vj style graphics. The interface is a number of wooden blocks which can be slid around a table top. The arrangement of each piece in a certain position triggers a specific sound and corresponding video loop via a projector. By utilizing more and more pieces the user can build layers of samples and create their own music. The Beat Jigsaw is an Interactive Multimedia Installation which invites audience participation. It is a musical instrument and most importantly, a lot of fun to play with!

Participation Systems