CFAT's 2020 Nocturne Summer Artist in Residence
CFAT's 2020 Nocturne Summer Artist in Residence
We are thrilled to announce Kelly Markovich as our 2020 Nocturne Summer Artist in Residence! Kelly will be developing throughout the summer until October, with a final project presented at the 2020 Nocturne Art at Night Festival.
About Kelly:
Kelly Markovich is an multidisciplinary artist. Her art practice investigates relationships between networks, memory, and shared collective experience. Engaging through issues of permanence, loss, presence, and absence, she draws reference from biology, anthropology and neuroscience.
About the project:
"Echolocation is the use of sound waves and echoes to determine where objects are in space. Bats use echolocation to navigate space and to find food in the dark. By sending out sound waves from the mouth or nose, when the signal hits an object a return echo is produced providing the bat with essential information.
Bats are wildly misunderstood and often irrationally feared and loathed as sinister creatures of the night, portrayed in folklore, storybooks, and films as being associated with the occult. However, bats are incredibly beneficial, providing invaluable service to ecosystems by assisting with non-toxic pest control and creating biodiversity.
For this project, I will explore the acoustics of ecology and the sounds of wildlife using bats as my subject and immersive special audio recording (a component of VR) as my medium. Relying on the sense of hearing, what I am proposing is to create a soundscape, sound art piece composed from audio recordings sourced from the feeding ecosystems of bats.
Although, immersive spatial audio is only a component of true VR, some argue that it is the most important component. Fully immersive spatial audio makes use of techniques creating a 3D sound experience by “positioning” different sounds in the room or virtual environment so that the brain may form a much fuller image without the need for visual ques.
Sound alone tells the participant everything they need to know about the immediate environment. Spatial immersive sound attempts to fill in the gaps that the brain needs to build a mental picture of the surroundings.
After puberty most humans lose the ability to hear sound frequencies at the level bats emit. A device is necessary for bringing the frequency into a range that is audible for the human ear. With the use of a homemade bat detector, specialized binaural and ambisonic microphones, and an audio recording device I will record sounds of bats echolocation that will be composed into a sound art piece.
The finished work will be approximately 10-minutes in length and will be played on a loop for the duration of the 6-hour festival. The most ideal presentation for this project is having it broadcast through multi-channel PA speakers. Using an 8- speaker, multi-channel set-up in a circular format, visitors to the festival may experience the piece from within the circle. This set-up allows for individualized audio sounds to be dedicated to different speakers at different times, creating movement and mimicking the motion patterns of bats while feeding." -Kelly Markovich
