Day Seven: back to the visual

​Over lunch at the Omelette Café we talked about which medium might be best as the core indicator of direction. Dan told us about his experience of Janet Cardiff’s walk through a theatre where the participant uses the moving image in the lcd screen of the camera to navigate by by lining up the recorded visuals with the live environment, in much the same way as my flickbooks do. Dan has had some experience of trying to make sound clues for navigation, both text and non-text based (ie footsteps) and he was struck by the elegance of point-of-view visual as a method of navigation (think google street view). That made me happy as my natural medium is very visual and confirmed my first instinct with the flick books was a good one. So perhaps we could use sound to deepen the immersion and give narrative support, rather than being solely responsible for giving the directional cues.
 
Finally with Dan, we recorded sound sequences to support some of the visual sequences I have in mind. These included the sound of someone following a walking listener from behind at southeast and southwest and the sound of someone walking from North to South, and from South to North passing a stationary listener close by.  I want to try a sequence where you hear someone coming up behind you and then see them walking past and away from you or vice versa. I’d also like to try the idea of lining up sounds at southeast and southwest as navigational cues.

Sound and navigation is a big subject and we have hardly scratched the surface.