Ambient Atlas

I have been turning over the question of meaning for some time now, and have begun to understand it as the significance that emerges through relations that also shape who or what can become a subject, and what those subjects can become (Barad, 2007; Rickert, 2013). Of course, the questions keep coming. What distinguishes an interpretive relation from a merely causal one? And under what conditions does a difference become significant, for whom or what, and with what consequences?

Ambient Atlas is a work that allows us to experiment with these uncertainties by forcing things that might otherwise not meet into relation. A listener can select a place and time, and in doing so, they bring forth new relations. Environmental conditions affect instruments, measurements enter technical systems, compositional rules translate selected differences into sound, and listeners encounter the results. The work asks where, within this sequence, relation creates meaning. Does significance arise at the moment of environmental measurement? Does it emerge through the rules of translation from one form of data to another? Or does it require an interpreting subject, thus finally - and only - emerging out of the listener’s experience?

Another explored dimension through this work is whether meanings formed through prior relations with a geographic place can persist while new ones emerge through sound. A listener inevitably brings memory, history, expectation, attachment, distance, and embodied experience to an encounter that environmental data cannot capture (Ihde, 2007; Hosokawa, 1984). Thus, the instrument introduces another set of relations into that history. Earlier and emerging meanings now may reinforce one another, conflict with one another, or even remain active without settling into a single account of the place.

Ambient Atlas works by fetching available environmental observations, calculating conditions, and translating them into responsive, generative, continuously evolving sound. Temperature, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, wind, cloud cover, daylight, and other measures become inputs into a composition that unfolds through duration, texture, density, pitch, movement, and space.

Alongside meaning, I have been working through my own understanding and definition of form. To this point, I have been treating it approximately as the patterned organization of relations through which conditions can emerge, become perceptible, and acquire meaning. It extends beyond outward appearance. Instead, it does deeper work of arranging relations among materials, bodies, technologies, histories, signs, and so forth. The resulting arrangements affect what participants can perceive, do, and become (Rancière, 2004; Rickert, 2013). It is because of this arrangement that different forms can produce different meanings from the same materials. Further, it operates temporally through repetition, duration, sequence, accumulation, interruption, and so on, shaping what becomes significant (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

In Ambient Atlas, my compositional mappings establish a form. And this form is made up of the arrangement of environmental sources, measures, mappings, sonic layers, visual translations (coming soon!), timing, controls, absences, explanations, and more. The available form conditions how this data, sound, location, and listener can enter into relation. And each listening encounter has the possibility of reinforcing, complicating, or transforming the form I am offering.

My piece does not claim to reveal what a place truly sounds like. Instead, it constructs a temporary territory in which selected conditions become available to the listener’s attention (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Thus, the work asks who or what is able to enter that relation, which environmental realities are made perceptible, which remain unavailable, and how various relations help to organize the conditions under which meaning can emerge (Rancière, 2004).

My hypothesis, then, is that form is a provisional arrangement of relations through which subsequent relations are enabled, constrained, and transformed. Being neither fixed, nor separate from relation, it serves as a temporary stabilization of relational activity. Following this, meaning is the significance that emerges through relation.

Corresponding references

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press.

Hosokawa, S. (1984). The Walkman effect. Popular Music, 4, 165–180. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000006218

Ihde, D. (2007). Listening and voice: Phenomenologies of sound (2nd ed.). SUNY Press.

Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans.). Continuum.

Rickert, T. (2013). Ambient rhetoric: The attunements of rhetorical being. University of Pittsburgh Press.