Traces of Noise is an artistic project that I made and propose particularly for SloMoCo. What I envision is utterly experimental as much as it is participatory and aligns with your ideas of transforming the “conference” format into a site of knowledge production. “Traces of Noise” investigates, in an artistic manner, the inequality between bodily motion in a physical environment (ie. in the out-of-doors) and its mediated, data-driven representation in virtual space. At the core of the piece lies an instruction for SloMoCo participants who volunteer to be part: via an app that I will be making purposedly for this project, they will move according to a “motion instruction score” while playing back a sound file on their mobile device in their surrounding outdoors. Doing so, they will be connected, via Zoom or similar, to the entire body of performers. The performance that may be experienced by an audience, gives rise to questions about the impossibility of mediating and accumulating environmental acoustemologies or bodily motion. “Traces of Noise” is an experimental performance piece for the virtual environment that emphasizes the inequality of experience in regard to location, site, human experience, motion, the out-of-doors, and the acoustics of place, by juxtaposing virtual and actual elements of sound and image. What I envision is making use of the opportunity of SloMoCo ‘21’s particular format. In particular, I’m interested in this (very rare!) fact that all participants will join in from different locations, while still forming a community of practice. This is why I propose a piece that is about the locations, and the people that are the SloMoCo participants. I imagine sending out a call via SloMoCo for other conference participants to participate in “Traces of Noise” on a volunteering basis, and with this group of people I would then work toward an artistic performance that is particularly made reflecting the conditions of SloMoCo ‘21, and which ideally leads to a public performance of the work in virtual space. This piece resonates with the SloMoCo mission in terms of raising issues around the impossibility of representing human motion and experience in virtual space that is, if even unconsciously, constructed and assembled via data. Details of the performance, such as length, formats, number of participants, and the exact design of the “Traces of Noise” mobile app, I would like to discuss with the SloMoCo organizers.
Text: Marcel Zaes, April 2021