Space-Dis-Place: How Sound and Interactivity can Reconfigure our Apprehension of Space

LMJ 16 focused on the expanding role of sound in art, science, business and everyday life. My article examines the plasticity of the perceptual spaces generated by sound and interactivity, and how their dynamic relationships to other perceptual spaces, both mediated and physical, affect our overall perception of the space we are in. I explore how this happens in everyday life, when aural events reframe our attention to and reading of our immediate experience, and how it may be used strategically in art and design work, from architecture through various media to virtual environments. I do this through a close analysis of certain of my own work in linear video and installations, contextualising this by reference to work by other makers, in particular Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull), Alvin Lucier (Vespers) and Carlo Scarpa (the Brion-Vega Cemetery). I discuss how in film and video, sound not only controls our emotional response to the image, but can also be used to create an illusion of three-dimensionality in a two dimensional image, and can further be used to undermine our judgement of what ‘reality’ is in the work. I then go on to examine how sound and interactivity can be used to reframe our relationship not only to the physical space we are in but also to other inhabitants or ‘actors’ in that space. I also examine how sound can be used to map poetics on to physical space in such a way that they become inseparable. In conclusion, extrapolating from Buckminster Fuller’s statement “I seem to be a verb”, I discuss, referencing my current work, how, as our made environment – both the built and that of distributed networks of mobile telecommunications – becomes more plastic and responsive, our relationship to it is becoming less noun-al and more verb-al.

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.

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