Sun Run Sun
Sun Run Sun
Art | Sci Center Guest Lecture
Yolande Harris
"Sun Run Sun" charts a path between environmental awareness and technological development, using sound as the medium to enhance both. The project investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position, exploring the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of connectedness to one's environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound.
This project consists of two different parts, a sound installation and a series of portable instruments to take on a walk through the city. In the installation 'Dead Reckoning' Yolande Harris reveals the patterns of orbiting satellites coming in and out of range and inconsistencies in how GPS technology locates the self in a longitude/latitude grid. The mobile 'Satellite Sounders' transform the live satellite data directly into a sonic composition listened to on headphones as one walks through the city. Live signals from satellites in orbit, together with the performer's coordinates on earth, generate a continuously transforming electronic soundscape. Yolande Harris's soundscape questions what is inside and what is outside, what it means to be located and what it means to be lost.
About Yolande Harris:
Understanding the relations between sound, image and space through technologies of communication and navigation, has been the central focus of Yolande's work over the last ten years. She explores the intermediary role of the score, both as practical and conceptual tool, and as an open imaginary situation for communication. Her Score Spaces project employs a spatial approach to composition and has resulted in numerous audio-visual performances and installations, including the Meta-Orchestra, theoretical texts, such as Inside Out Instrument, and workshops for composers, sound artists, architects and designers. Her most recent works, Taking Soundings and Sun Run Sun, employ intuitive and scientific modes of knowing and join ancient and contemporary navigation and orientation techniques from sextants to GPS, to explore our apparently changing relation to land and sea environments in the age of satellite and mobile technologies. Yolande has a degree in music from Dartington College of Arts and a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge in architecture and the moving image. She has been resident researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, artistic fellow at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and artist in residence at STEIM and the Netherlands Institute for Media Arts in Amsterdam. She has taught interaction design at the Technical University of Eindhoven, is guest lecturer at the Rietveld Academy Design Lab, and lectures on her work internationally. Her writings have been published in the Contemporary Music Review and Journal of Organised Sound.