Cultural cinema and digital creativity centre in Bristol UK

Two weeks ago, artist Jen Southern began the Embedded Residency at Pervasive Media Studio in collaboration with Sound and Music, to develop a new project exploring sonic art, pervasive technologies and touch.

Jen has worked with GPS tracking for the past ten years, making visual representations of routes and paths, (satellitebureau.net) and investigating how GPS location data might be used for communication at a distance, (comob.org.uk).

During this residency, she aims to create pairs of location-aware objects that use sound to link people over a distance. Inspired by the way elephants, reindeers and whales communicate, Jen has begun by ‘sonifying’ GPS data. In collaboration with Dan Williams, she's created a Space Metronome, which allows her to listen to GPS data and changing speeds of movement. The Space Metronome is now working, and has helped Jen understand what it feels like to listen to movement. You can see video clips of it here.

Jen has also been busy researching: She's met with some interesting people including Matthew Lovett, a musician, researcher and Senior Lecturer at Newport University; and Tarim, creator of Media Playgrounds. She's also discovered  inspiring projects such as Rambler Shoes by Popkalab, (shoes that send the word 'tap' to Twitter, for each step they make); Momobot by Che-Wei Wang and Kristin O’Friel, (a tactile object almost like a toy or a pet, that moves in your hands to point the way, leading you through the streets); a haptic belt (that uses vibrations to communicate direction to soldiers during the ‘fog of war’); 'Jogging over a Distance' (a project that uses sound to communicate between running partners who are in different places); and more.

Finally, as her project is all about linking people, alongside research and tech experiments Jen has begun a series of workshops to explore how sounds and objects remind us of other people; and how we keep in touch with our close friends and relatives. The first of these took place last week with 12 willing participants from PM Studio and Watershed. You can read more about it here.

Jen will continue work on the project between September 2011 and January 2012. You can find out more, keep up to date with her progress and post your comments on her Project Journal, and if you’re interested in getting involved in future workshops or discussions, drop me a line at: victoria@watershed.co.uk

This residency is part of Embedded, a Sound and Music initiative delivered in partnership with iShed, a part of Watershed, supported by Pervasive Media Studio and funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.