An Immersive Database of Sound Art: Towards a Minor History

This paper presents a practice-based project being undertaken as part of a PhD research program at the CRiSAP Research Unit (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice), London College of Communication. The project involves the development of a database of ‘sound art’ presented in an immersive installation environment, allowing a ‘post-convergent’ [1] experience of this ‘minor’ art history. Research activity has oscillated between a focus upon the technical means of delivering such a creative work, and a study of broader contemporary philosophy acting to inform and problematicise such an endeavor.

The digital application being developed (ImMapp) is of particular relevance to the theme of the YTC conference. Much academic work addressing sound art has occurred within the confines of the monograph. The ImmApp however, attempts an alternative means of accessing and analyzing this fragmented history, and is in effect, a three-dimensional audio-visual atlas of the culture-space of auditory art practice and discourse.

The open-source digital technologies used in the creation of this work operate upon a plane distinct from, but complementary to, print-based methodologies. The culture of sound art has provided a key inspiration in the design of the application and the ImmApp is intended to embody some of the tropes evident in much sound work (spatiality, multi-speaker set ups, simultaneity, collage). The project as a whole has been shaped then by a symbiosis between digital technology, the kind of structuring enabled/limited by such, and the culture-space of a ‘minor’ art practice.

This paper will outline the historical and conceptual context for the work, discuss the technical framework that has been adopted, demonstrate my working methodology, and end by proposing some possible trajectories for future work.