Audio/Interface Programmer, Sound Designer
For Bindu Shards, audio and light needed to be synchronized in order to create a fully engaging and immersive piece. Using Max/MSP, a visual programming tool for audio, I created an interface in order to bridge the gap between the auditory experience and the light. A DMX hardware interface was used to connect the Max/MSP interface to the light system that was installed. The sound design was done working with Alexandra Kuechenberg. Coming out of the concept of Binaural Beats, the sound was created to bring the user into a meditative state by stimulating brain waves.
The relation of exterior light to interior light is explored further in the work Bindu Shards (2010), a fully immersive visual and auditory work to be experienced by one person at a time. Part of the ongoing Perceptual Cells series, Bindu Shards possesses the same invasive qualities of "behind-the-eyes" seeing as could be experienced in Gasworks (1993) which was first shown at the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust in Halifax, and then at the ICA, London in 1996. In the late 1980s, Turrell resumed work on the Perceptual Cells, which stemmed from his university studies, then continued from 1968 through 1970 as a collaboration with the artist Robert Irwin and two psychologists. Each cell stimulates an experience in which there is no object of perception; the light which is presented is light "not seen." This produces the "Purkinje effect," a transitional patterning that is perceived uniquely during the transition from light to dark. Together with the Dark Space series begun in 1983, Shards shares this dissolving of the juncture between the light outside and the light inside. During the eight to twelve minutes required for the eyes to adapt to darkness, the realm where the difference between "in-front" and "back-of-the-eyes" seeing dissolves and allows the iris to open.