Deadline: 1 November 2012
Open to: Musicians, sound artists and engineers
Prize: Winning sound pieces will be included in playlist of concerts at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany
Description
Musicians, sound artists and engineers are invited to program sound compositions for the interactive installation “Sounding Door,” an electronic installation designed to turn a door into a musical instrument and a stage at once. Selected sound pieces will be included in the playlist of the door “concerts” taking place at the entrance of the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM), and will become a part of the museum’s permanent collection.
“Sounding Door” is an interactive sound art installation equipped with custom-designed electronics and software, so that the installation plays and composes sounds according to the door’s movements.
The installation was created in 2009 in Vilnius, Lithuania, as a part of the larger project, “Talking Doors,” which was supported by the national program “Vilnius European Cultural Capital 2009.” The project won a number of awards, one of which was Distinction in the Interactive Art category of Prix Ars Electronica 2010. Most recently, the “Sounding Door” was acquired by the ZKM for its permanent collection. You can find more information about ZKM HERE.
The installation’s author, Julijonas Urbonas, remarks that sound designers create the sounds of mobile phones, crispy corn flakes and even hairdryers, while apparently leaving such essential element of daily experience as the door without due attention. He also notices that sound design and architectural acoustics have become disciplines in their own right, and the sound of architecture itself is still rarely discussed. Inspired by these observations, he invited composers, musicians, sound designers and sound artists to contribute sound pieces that would consider the following question: “Why are we confined to choosing a door for our home space based only on the visual characteristics of the former and not, for instance, the specific sound of its hinges?”
This is part of a series of projects involving doors in Lithuania. In 2009, five doors to well-known public buildings in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius were transformed into interactive installations. Equipped with electronic devices, the doors became a portal to Lithuania’s Democracy Index, a musical instrument, a kinetic sculpture and even the source of an earthquake. Talking Doors ultimately proved to be not only the materialization of symbolic concepts but also a peculiar experiment that evoked a whole series of curious events.
Talking Doors study the door’s poetic power of organising and provoking various psychological, conceptual, and social events in public space. The selected unique door-related and door-mediated events are exaggerated, deformed and deconstructed in interactive installations located in the public spaces of central Vilnius. The project aims at becoming an analytical door ‘slaughterhouse’ and critical playground.
Requirements
Composition should be programmed to interact with one or all of the motional features of a door, that is, its position, direction, speed and acceleration. Preferable format is MAX patch. Mono audio output.
“Sounding Door” uses a special sensor for monitoring the door motional parameters and feeds the data to a custom programmed MAX/MSP environment. For more information on the latter and the technical setup of the installation, please check the code and the diagram at the bottom of this website or contact the project’s author.
Application
Compositions should be emailed to sound@julijonasurbonas.lt by 1 NOVEMBER 2012.
For questions, contact:
Julijonas Urbonas
sound@julijonasurbonas.lt
tel.: +447500142885 (UK), +37061945384 (LT)
For more information, see the original call for applications HERE. The Sounding Doors website is AVAILABLE HERE. Watch a video about the Open Doors project, AVAILABLE HERE.