03 October 2011

Soundwalk 2011

Saturday night was Soundwalk in Long Beach, CA. Soundwalk is an annual sound art festival. This year, there were about 40 artists who took over about 6 square blocks of downtown LB with their noise installations. I had two projects in this year.

The Whole World Blind was a partnership with Roxanne Varzi, an anthropologist here at UCI. We worked together to create a binaural recording that de-contextualizes the visual elements of war photographs. It was a really interesting piece, and I heard a lot of great response about it.

City Park (2011) is a project by my collective, Push The Button. Brad Berridge, Davin Huston, and I created an interactive environment using ipads and iphones. We installed in a storefront on 3rd St.


Over the course of the night, we had lots of visitors come into our room. The population cycled between 5 and 35 people, each of whom got a chance to use the iDevices to control the sonic environment.

We got a lot of great feedback during the event, including more than one person who called us 'geniuses' (which, of course, we won't let to go our head). Plus, this installation was the first time we had children take part in the exhibition, and we found that kids as young as 2 REALLY got into the way that they could control the sounds with their fingers. Here's a couple older kids (younger adults) pushing the buttons.

What's next? Well, we're not telling. But Push the Button's got plans.