SatelliteSounding.mp3

Sun Run Sun: Satellite Sounding (7′43″)Yolande Harris
The Satellite Sounders are custom made hand-held instruments that take live navigation data (gps) from the satellites orbiting the earth and turn them into electronic sounds listened to on headphones while walking. In this piece the reactions of the public who become the performers, combined with the satellite sounds collected from four corners of the world, activates an imaginative space of both dreams and suspicions enacted above the everyday.
Sun Run Sun and the Satellite Sounders: composition, concept and design Yolande HarrisWith thanks to participants at the Picnic08 Conference Amsterdam, Virtueel Platform and Fonds BKVBDeveloped at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMK) and STEIM Amsterdam during 2008Satellite sounds recorded on location in Genova, Los Angeles, Singapore, at Sea 2008

more information: http://www.sunrunsun.nimk.nl

A jackdaw (bird) has flown onto my roof and is making a series of complex sounds that appear to articulate something I can only try to understand. Its inflections of tone and timbre that irresistibly seem like language have drawn my attention and I have begun recording the sound. In doing so the jackdaw’s voice has made me shift my focus and listen to the environmental sounds outside my room in Amsterdam. My internal space – my concentration on the thoughts – is located in my physical room that is remarkably quiet, the only sound being my computer keyboard whilst I type this. The voice of the Jackdaw comes from just outside my space, I can’t see it, only hear as it sits and sounds the in-between space, so close as to be almost in the room. The sounds of Amsterdam then become clearer and present, although distant. The sound of the jackdaw is articulating an in-between, the intermedial, a moving back and forth between the internal, inside, to outside.