7 Transitions
On a Saturday morning in May, with the help of friends, I conducted the first field test of 7 Transitions: a location aware, public sound installation for train cars on the 7 line through Queens.
The project incorporates a GPS module, the coordinates of which are passed through an Arduino microcontroller into Pure Data on my laptop. The Pd program is written to trigger sound according to what neighborhood the train is passing through—a sonic demarcation of civic boundaries that seeks not so much to represent the diverse neighborhoods of Queens as to highlight the transitions between them. For this iteration, I’ve employed a USB speaker to project chords of pure tones into the public space of a train car.
To invite passengers into the experience, we also distributed flyers with a brief statement in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean. This helped to provide a context for the work and allay concerns about the nature of our activity. (Cooperation with the MTA will likely be necessary for a larger scale installation.) It’s my hope that the transformation taking place on the train would also reconfigure the relationship between strangers who simultaneously occupy that space, in inverse proportion to the way a train delay does, for example.
7 Transitions reflects on the dynamics of nomadism, the character of urban neighborhoods, and the influence of proximity on one’s identity. A manifestation of research begun in the fall and developed over the spring semester, it was critically insightful to realize the project in public. For future development, there are at least two aspects to improve upon. First, I’d like for the sound to include input from the immediate environment, processed and output as part or in place of the prepared sound. At present it’s somewhat programmatic. I also need to find a more substantial method of deploying mobile audio as the speaker didn’t have quite the range I was hoping for.
Here is a video of the transition from Woodside to Sunnyside. Additionally, a video of me explaining the project to visitors at ITP’s end-of-semester show can be viewed here.