Monthly Archives: April 2014

Design, Projects

A theoretical brief for ‘how not to die’ (Project Proposal)

Note: This is a theoretical brief for students, it has not been commissioned or asked to be developed but is just a way for me to get down some questions that I would like design students to examine.

Brief: How Not To Die

The Hexayurt, designed by Vinay Gupta, is a simple shelter that can be built using available materials quickly and easily. It was designed in response to the Sustainable Settlements Charette in 2002.

Project Proposals:
Communications: How to communicate how to build a hexayurt. How to quickly build a shelter and how to maintain and evolve it as it is lived in.

Industrial Design: Evolve the hexayurt.

Systems Design: Camp processes, design a system to help manage refugee camps and support those people who have to live there.

Background Reading:

Much of the work by Vinay Gupta is about this, the hexayurt, the primary axis for the brief was invented by Gupta and released into the commons.

Art, military-pastoral, Palindrone

electromagnetic noise

Working on Palindrone has opened up a whole new area of research and experimentation in playing with and listening to sound. I have been reading ‘The The Field – The Art of Field Recording‘ by Cathy Lane & Angus Carlyle as it is working with these found, recorded sounds (from the field) that currently interests me.

To work alongside Palindrone I am thinking about sound and landscape, especially the English Pastoral landscape and the sounds of light aircraft, the thrum of the distant yet always near motorways in the UK. When developing Palindrone I was thinking about the sound of light aircraft flying over head whilst on a pleasant walk in the English countryside, as well as harking back to the now Military-Pastoral sound of the Spitfire or Hurricane flying overhead in the south of England. Almost romantic notions of sound, technology and landscape.

There is another sound that pervades these landscapes though, we won’t hear it as we walk through the grass, but the sounds in the electromagnetic spectrum are saturated with noise of the modern and this is also the space for much of the modern Military Industrial Complex, with its Signal Intelligence.

Electrical currents generate magnetic fields, which have sonic properties. You can pick these up with a ‘telephone pickup coil‘. This will pick up all sorts of sounds.

This is the sound of my laptop:

As an experiment I am going to make some recordings of urban, suburban and rural landscapes using this basic set up, just to hear what is there.

Palindrone

Palindrone – The sound of drones

Palindrone is about sound.

We spent a bit of time looking for existing recordings of drones to use as a basis for the work, originally I found this recording:

Posted by user Rosa Schiano, who, according to their YouTube profile is an Italian activist and photoreporter. The video was taken during the Israeli military operation “Pillar of Cloud”, which took place 14th through 21st November 2012. (This in the YouTube description for the video, is how Rosa refers to the operation, searching wikipedia returns this entry for “Operation Pillar of Defense” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pillar_of_Defense] for which the Hebrew literally translates to “Pillar of Cloud”).

This operation is the first where there was no significant IDF presence on the ground in Gaza, the operation conducted through the use of air power, ostensibly through the use of drones.

When describing the project idea to Cathal, this was the sound that I used to illustrate what I was initially thinking of.

Further research led Cathal to find these samples that have been put online by Rana Baker and Rowaid El-Madhoun. It was these samples that formed the basis of the ‘drone’ that we installed at Lighthouse for v1.0 of Palindrone.

Rana Baker https://audioboo.fm/RanaGaza

Rowaid El-Madhoun https://soundcloud.com/rowaid-el-madhoun

Again, these samples are from Gaza. The reports on drone use that helped to inspire the creation of the piece were reporting on their use in Yeman and Pakistan. In my searches online I have not found any significant online recordings of drone use in these regions though I am sure there are good reasons for this.

Of course, the affect these machines have is the same, the sound creating an omnious terrorizing atmosphere and whilst the report that I initially read was based on the situation in Yeman, further online research has uncovered similar reports from Gaza.

We have tried to contact both people but are yet to hear back from them, hence one reason for writing this post was to creat something to point at explaining what we are trying to do and how we are currently using their samples.

We have started to experiment with creating our own sound, artificially, as well as trying to create some field recordings of light aircraft. We do not want to use the samples we have found in further public installation without having spoken with the originators of the recordings.

How we continue to shape the sound of the piece depends on a lot of things, but if either Rana or Rowaid want to get in touch then they can email me at mark@geekyoto.com and I will be happy to talk to them further about what we are trying to do with Palindrone.