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Simultaneous Echoes

A 3-D Audio-Visual Installation by Masaki Fujihata, Frank Lyons and Takeshi Kawashima. “Simultaneous Echoes” has been exhibited at ISEA in Derry/Londonderry; Landshaft 2.0 in Oldenburg, Germany; Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland; and Cream in Yokohama and Tokyo Museum of Photography, Japan. The piece was awarded the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs Media Art Prize in 2010.

This collaboration between video artist Fujihata, composer and sound designer Lyons and software programmer Kawashima set out to investigate how notions of contested space and border may be challenged in cyberspace.

Initial fieldwork comprised recording of audio, video and GPS (Global Positioning System) tracking data in areas in the North West of Ireland containing borders of various types and degrees of political contention. Musical instruments that have come to represent opposing sides in sectarian conflict were given roles in the piece.

In the installation of “Simultaneous Echoes” Fujihata and Lyons assembled a work consisting of seven short pieces wherein digital video and fine web-like tracks generated from the GPS data are projected onscreen in 3-D. The visual is fused with a soundtrack of field recordings and transformations of samples taken in the field, spatialised using 8-channel playback to create an immersive environment with which the audience can interact using a specially designed hardware controller to choose video location and to manipulate audio positioning, transcending accepted boundaries on a variety of levels.

The key aesthetic concern in “Simultaneous Echoes” was the examination of how shared use of key datastreams from GPS readings to control creative parameters in audio, video and spatialisation could create organic consistency across the work. The video artist, composer and software programmer each used common datasets mined from recordings of GPS tracking data to dictate software settings; for example in particular scenes in the piece the same series of numbers was used to control granular synthesis parameters of soundfile manipulation in Csound software, for selecting the number and length of video clips, and for setting the initial spatial placement of the audio in the 8-channel array in the Fieldworks software.