Composition: The wind
Project Proposal 2022
As a ‘bird of passage’ travelling between two homes across East and West, I am interested in immaterial phenomena such as the winds that travel seemingly freely between spaces and aren’t bound by materials. I will be examining this movement of the air that comes in and out of a room through a window. Agitating the boundaries between interior/exterior and here/there, I feel that the wind metaphorically conveys a poetic idea of today’s virtual communication, one that connects and shares a moment over great distances. At the same time, small gusts of air – visibly stirring fabric hanging by a window – break the stillness of a room and introduce the idea of wider flowing time beyond.
This project will be a site-specific installation in a room that interacts with air currents entering naturally through a window. Sensing the movement of fabric that swirls in the air, the system will trigger each programmed musical note to be played, generating a sound trace for each passing moment. The wind becomes the composer, playing the melody comprised of serial moments.
The sound piece I intend to build will be based on the cloned voice of my grandmother. She recently told me her life story as we lay on a bed together. In her fleeting words, I felt her grief, anger, and longing; her fragile but stubborn voice travelled along her past decisions in life. However, the immateriality of this sound with no visual accompaniment and carrying an individual’s memory seemed transitory, evoking the “lightness” of being. And this lightness to me signified the idea of freedom like the wind.
Her voice, incorporeal and traversing the room, will be like a shadow in space that reveals the illusory time-scape. Her voice, condensing the long-lived years, will sing the wind – the moment that comes but does not come back again.
For this project, I worked with Asher Yang, the sound artist I had approached to collaborate with in manifesting the musicality of the wind. On top of deciding twenty musical notes – C, C#, Eb, E, G, G#, A, A#, Bb, B – over two octaves that sounded more abstract and experimental in effect when played together, we also incorporated edited sounds from nature of fire, wind, and leaves, as well as whispers to play in the background, merging the interactive tones into one smooth melody.
Overall, the mood of this work came out very differently to the direction of my original idea, which was a more intimate and private experience, placed in an interior setting. Nevertheless, this work installed outdoors on the corner of busy streets engendered its own mysteriousness, interweaving the raw atmosphere with the background noise of people and pigeons passing by. Also, as is shown in the last bit of the video sketch, the prayer chanting from the next-door building merged beautifully into the work. It was very unexpected, but I enjoyed the interaction and it inspired my thinking in relation to this project’s further development.
This is a physical sketch of my proposal, installed in an outdoor setting that provides an interesting context for fabric to interact with the surrounding atmosphere. To try out the sonification system, I programmed the camera to sense the grayscale of a specific pixel on moving fabric. The pixel tones were grouped into twenty categories, each matching with twenty notes of sound that were played as the system sensed a change in value. Because the program spotted changing tones on the fabric, the shifting natural light during the day intersected with the mood of the sound it created. As the space dimmed towards the night, the generated sound became more sombre. The notes also became more repetitive as there was less difference in the grayscale value when it got dark.
I also propose another project, building upon the aforementioned experimentation but in different settings. Through the medium of wind, I seek to establish connections with places that are isolated, forbidden, neglected or abandoned. An example that resonates with my nationality is the DMZ of the Korean Peninsula. The DMZ is the neutral zone around the border that separates North and South, where neither military forces nor civilians are allowed to cross. Nevertheless, I've noticed one element that consistently traverses this border freely: the wind.
My interest lies in capturing the wind movement in the DMZ, and digitally transforming its atmospheric essence into a soundscape remotely installed at the exhibition venue. The ambitious plan entails the installation of fabric along the extensive border of the DMZ. Using visual data gathered from wind interactions with the fabric, I will generate sound to be played at a different site.
The intention for this project is to deliver the real-time atmosphere of the DMZ to the audience at the exhibition venue in the form of an immersive experience of spatial telematics. The project allows visitors to remotely experience the live wind interactions of the DMZ that becomes a poetic metaphor for the muted state of interaction currently permitted between the North and South.
