Final Project

Here’s my final project…

Anywhere But Here

Experiment for Final Project

Hey all,

I was playing around with ideas for my final project (which will hopefully turn out to be an audio composition consisting of samples from the geotagged sounds on freesound.org), and I thought I’d share the product of today’s work.  It’s far from what I want my final project to sound like, but it’s a start!

The samples I used for this mix came from Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and I think there might be one sample from South America.  Enjoy listening to the whole world all at the same time!

Collage One

Mashup

Pen Pencil Marker Chalk

In Exile

I spent a lot of time combing the internet, looking for a net art piece that I actually wanted to review. There is a lot of interesting work out there, but it took some time to filter through it all to find something that actually had some emotional and intellectual resonance for me. Finally, I stumbled apon Carlo Zanni’s My Temporary Visiting Position From The Sunset Terrace Bar. The concept seems pretty simple: a daily video stream of the sunset in Naples. Upon poking around the website, I learned that the foreground of the video is actually pre-recorded, and is not in Naples at all, but rather Ahlen, Germany, so we have a city in Germany superimposed over the sky in Naples.

It didn’t happen to be sunset in Naples when I found the website, but there is an archive of previous days, and the archive videos have been “time accelerated,” so you can watch the sun set on fast-forward. I watched several sunsets – each video begins with the reading of a poem (“A Tormented Owl at Home and in Exile” by Ghada Samman, a Syrian poet) by a man with an American accent, and features music from the Gotan Project, an Argentinian band. The artist himself is Italian, and according to his bio lives in Milan and New York, and the website was created by a company in Argentina.

The piece therefore reaches from South America to North America to Italy to Germany to Syria, just in its creation. It deals with issues of space and time, home and exile, distance and community. It provides the viewer with choices in how they wish to experience the work: live and in real time, or archived and time-accelerated, subtitled in English or German or not at all, and with or without the additional information provided by the website.