http://www.frey.co.nz/projects/wind

“Wind is an experiment in real-time cross-perceptual visual sonification. Through digital transformation, a visual phenomenon becomes an audio phenomenon. Through an emphasis on process, the viewer’s attention is drawn away from the artwork as a representation of some phenomenon, and toward an experience of the phenomenon itself. The artwork serves purely to facilitate this movement, to shift the viewer’s perception away from their understanding of the artwork itself, and toward their own experience of the phenomena that the artwork is supposed to be ‘about.’ […] The overall result is the following. You, the viewer, see some tall grass moving in the wind; seemingly connected to it, you hear what sounds like a digital wind chime, but it is more than this, somehow; it seems to be related to what the wind looks like when it blows across the grass, rather than just to the wind itself. Intrigued, you step over toward the blatantly technical installation of video camera and laptop computer in front, to try and figure out what is going on, to see if you can ‘understand the work.’ Examining the computer and the video camera you find the process laid out bare in front of you: here’s the input, here’s the processing, here’s the output. Armed with this understanding, you begin to pay more attention to the connection between what your eyes are seeing from the real world—the input—and what your ears are hearing in the real world—the output. And at this final stage, you find yourself experiencing nothing but the phenomena themselves.

An open-source (GPL v3) project, made with openFrameworks and Pure Data, with production completed during a New Interfaces for Performance residency”

wind installation documentation from damian on Vimeo.