...Upon the Seas to which It Eventually Flows

The Biosphere, built by Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao as the US pavilion at Expo ’67, is the largest existent geodesic dome. Currently housing a research centre and museum dedicated to the study of water use and conservation, it remains an iconic building. It is much visited by a wide audience, ranging from academics and researchers, through tourists to schoolchildren.

I was invited to research and develop an audio installation to enhance, and stimulate interest in the garden in the centre of the structure. My intention was to bring together, in a poetic dialogue, aspects of Buckminster Fuller’s thought and our relationship to and dependency on water; it also furthered my own investigations into the relationship of sound to space, and how the former can reframe our perception of the latter. I used the sounds of voices speaking Fuller texts in 14 languages and recordings of water I had made worldwide; the voice sounds were treated so that they ‘dissolved’ into the water, and the sounds were dispersed in the garden over 12 channels, with the position and movement of sounds mapped according to Fuller’s dymaxion principles.

The installation, while being an art object in its own right, reveals the range and relevance of Fuller’s thought by contextualising the poetics and informatics of his world vision within linguistic and locational referencing, concentrated into a specific physical and aural space, creating an aural structure based on his design principles.

Stuart Jones Research Interests:

Development and application of interactive technologies in the built environment.

Use of sound to reconfigure our perceptions of space and vice versa.

Use of data sonification to communicate information about the environment in real time.

Use of interaction, in conjunction with other media, to create narrative environments.

Development of a body of theory to underpin creative practice for narrative environments

Current Research

My practice is mainly in installation or performative work, but also encompassing linear video and film, and often in collaboration with artists from other disciplines. My current key research interests are in the relationship of sound to space, and how they reconfigure each other, and in interaction, and how it may be imbedded in spaces and spatial narratives. My practice started out in musical composition, performance and improvisation, but soon branched out into installation, spreading sound and performance through spaces. I first used a computer to make a piece in 1972 and made my first interactive installation in 1973. My then attraction to interactivity derived from my interest in the balance of forces in the triangle between the maker, the audience and the resulting artefact/event, and how it might be changed by giving the audience increased agency. The agency of the audience or user remains the key concern which underlies my research: how can we use interactive technology to enable people to have realistic and valuable-to-them dialogue with and control over the artefacts and buildings that surround them? What role can sound play in such a discourse? Research in which I am currently engaged includes examining how children move from an intradiegetic to an extradiegetic position as they mature, and the implications this has for interaction design, especially in narrative environments; and the development of theory to populate an online thesaurus of terms, concepts, images and other media, as they apply in the creation and understanding of narrative environments.