Digital Materiality

Throughout the Making Space residency i’ve been undertaking experiments with open source digital tools, exploring ideas of networked space and materiality. I am missing the physicality of objects and working hands on with materials, in the sketch below I built a reflective metal textured object and placed this within a 3D environment using footage from my first AURA post. I wanted to see how digital materials could be experienced in the desktop and consider how tactile or tangible they felt, what feelings does this digital materiality evoke?

Timetravel

It is exactly one year since I was in St Petersburg, the last place I travelled to before lockdown. Being part of the Making Space residency one year later, it has been an interesting experience to visit again but this time in a virtual sense. Doing the behind the scenes tour of the Museum of Nonconformist art (where I had played a gig in Feb 2020) was both a wonderful and strange experience. The virtual tour felt like a form of teleportation, to be in exactly the same space one year ago but to uncover layers of history and new information about the building and it’s artists was fascinating and unworldly.

I visited St Petersburg and Moscow on a creative research trip and whilst there I recorded sounds and radio fragments of the locations. The clip below shows a short experiment I made in my St Petersburg hotel room, also there is my favourite and treasured object from the trip, a radio I picked up at a flea market outside St Petersburg, that I have sampled in my sound work back here in Manchester.

I’ve been listening back to the recordings I made one year ago, and to complete the circle of my Making Space posts, wanted to leave you with a combined sonic melding of the two places and marking the one year time difference, where life kind of stopped or paused in 2020

Sample one is from the train journey I took to Moscow where I was manipulating St Petersburg radio fragments at around 7am as I travelled across the terrain in Feb 2020

Frequency two is an experiment from the AURA frequency tests I made from the first Making Space video with MAXMSP in Feb 2021.

Manchester and St Petersburg are twinned cities, so I leave you with this combined fragment of the two locations, melded together across time, space and networks.

Thank you to Anastasia, Liza and all at St Petersburg Residency and Museum of Nonconformist Art, it has been so wonderful to connect with you 🙂