Sonic Playground

Sonic Playground: An interactive Sound Experience

Sonic Playground is a generative art installation. It is a collaborative system, employing the interaction of program and person as its function base. The user enters the gallery and is met with a large, live video feed of themselves on the wall. That user immediately becomes aware that the sound they are making is causing that image to respond through color change, bending, shifting, rotating, etc. The system tells the program to apply these video filters based on the frequency range it receives from the user. That act of collaboration generates striking, visual imagery (see the image gallery below).

There is a narrative quality to the generated images. They speak to us and tell us things. There are stories of joy, sadness, curiosity, and suffering, all created from the act of collaborative play. And these difference stories seem not to exist as separate events, but simultaneously, as if to say that the experience of joy or suffering, for example, aren't as far apart as one might think. Perhaps joy never follows suffering. Perhaps suffering never follows joy. What if, instead, they exist together, a breath apart, always informing one another and winking at one another in recognition of the fact that each needs the other to exist, to thrive, and to inform the lives they affect every day.

And isn't that the way life actually is?

We live our lives, not in the linear, each event and emotion happening in sucession, but in circle, experiencing events and emotions all at once, all the time. Yes, the things we experience in our daily lives ebb and flow, creating an illusion of linearity, but in truth, we are constantly receiving and processing a multitudinous circle of data. The nature of the images created in "Sonic Playground" give creedence to this idea of "circle." While the installation makes a statement about interactive nature of technology, more fundamentally, it is about the experience of human beings in the world, living and experiencing ALL things everyday and the beauty that arises, no matter what the story.