Yolande Harris - Sun Run Sun: on Sonic Navigations



'Sun Run Sun' charts a path between environmental awareness and technological development, using sound as the medium to enhance both. The project investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position, exploring the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of connectedness to one's environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound.

This project consists of two different parts, a sound installation and a series of portable instruments to take on a walk through the city. In the installation 'Dead Reckoning' Yolande Harris reveals the patterns of orbiting satellites coming in and out of range and inconsistencies in how GPS technology locates the self in a longitude/latitude grid. The mobile 'Satellite Sounders' transform the live satellite data directly into a sonic composition listened to on headphones as one walks through the city. Live signals from satellites in orbit, together with the performer's coordinates on earth, generate a continuously transforming electronic soundscape. Yolande Harris's soundscape questions what is inside and what is outside, what it means to be located and what it means to be lost.


Originally posted on newmediafix.net by Rhizome