{"id":453,"date":"2021-05-25T08:02:02","date_gmt":"2021-05-25T08:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.explodingart.com\/arb\/?p=453"},"modified":"2021-06-15T06:15:40","modified_gmt":"2021-06-15T06:15:40","slug":"audio-assemblage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.explodingart.com\/arb\/2021\/05\/25\/audio-assemblage\/","title":{"rendered":"Audio Assemblage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This interactive audio installation features human-machine co-creation of emerging sonic structures. Participants become part of a network of bespoke sonic agents – simple computational machines that listen to, and respond with, sound – to create a swarm of sound arising from multiple individual sonic events. Designed behaviours contribute to an emergent sound design challenging us to reconsider our relations with, and effect upon, the non-human world we interact with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Audio Assemblage devices – employing the On Board PCB version 1.0<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The work draws attention to emergent behaviour as it exists in societies and in nature where, for example, groups of people chat, or groups of cicadas chirp together. The title resonates with an academic tradition of inquiry into our human relations with nature and our societal interactions. In particular, the term assemblage was used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to describe \u201cthe differential relations and relative movements\u201d (7) that gather things together into temporary unities. They emphasise the importance of multiplicities rather than reductionist views of elements and their properties. The term was taken up by Latour (2007) for his Actor Network Theory which had a particularly sociological perspective yet draw attention to networks of humans and non-humans, including technologies, arguing \u201cthat some assemblages are built out of social stuff instead of physical, biological, or economical blocks\u201d (43). A fully fledged Assemblage Theory was developed by DeLanda (2006) which emphasised the contingent nature of assemblies and the influence of temporal contexts. \u201cThe identity of any assemblage at any level of scale\u201d he suggests, \u201cis always the product of a process \u2026 and it is always precarious, since other processes \u2026 can destabilize it\u201d (28).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Audio Assemblage was exhibited as part of Designing Culture at the Pop Gallery, Brisbane, in 2021<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The work, Audio Assemblage, provokes us to consider the circumstances that lead to complex emergent behaviour and how we can design to facilitate or mitigate such interaction. How do simple behaviours result in complex outcomes? Can we anticipate or predict emergent outcomes from such simple systems, yet alone from complex ones? What is the agency at play in such circumstances and how is that agency distributed and coupled? Is there a difference between human and non-human agency, if so, what is that and how do we design with those agency relationships in mind?<\/p>\n\n\n\n