danielle wilde

soundwall

soundwall is a collaboration between myself and Rachel Wingfield, a second year MPhil student in the RCA department of textiles. It was a two week project, during which time our aim was to create some kind of a working installation with which we could explore the idea and experience of human presence having a tangible effect on space. It is not intended as an installation, complete with expectations of almost instant or immediate response/gratification, but rather as an enhanced environment designed to provoke reflection over time.

The premise with which we began was that when a person enters a room, their presence alters the experience of the space for the other inhabitants - whether or not they are consciously aware of the arrival of this additional person. If this new person is making noise, above and beyond the ambient noise already recorded in the space, then the repercussions of their presence are amplified.

We split the floor of a space into a 10 x 10 grid, and mapped this grid, virtually, onto a wall. The idea is actually that the floor, as seen from above, would be mapped to the entire volume of the space but we didn't feel this was necessary to explore the assumptions we were interested in.

An overhead video camera captured the floor area at very low resolution, and with this information we were able to ascertain where and when any changes in the space occured - i.e. we could detect new and changing presence. The amount of squares in our grid which were changed from their original state, that of the unoccupied space, determined the hue, or colour of our display. This mapping of colour could be learnt over time. The intensity of the colour in each square of the grid depended on a number of different factors: how long the square was "changed" from it's original state - i.e. the more time passed in this "altered" or occupied state, the more intense the colour became (the blend of the square increased over time, decreasing incrementally once the square was recorded as "empty" or identical to it's original state). If the room was silent, the maximum blend possible per square was 20%. This platform was raised if the soundlevel was recorded as above 20/255, therefore if there were adequate ambient noiselevels, the intensity of colour of an "inhabited" square could reach the maximum possible, i.e. 100% blend.