Rocio von Jungenfeld

The Surface Inside, 2011, Sensory Worlds, Informatics Forum, Edinburgh

Audiovisual-walk in collaboration with Shiori Usui

Park, headphones, portable screens, handheld projector, binaural, gloves, mp3, film

The Surface Inside is an audiovisual-walk created for the Sensory Worlds Conference and Art Exhibition organised by IASH, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in December 2011.

Thanks to Rachel Harkness, IASH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for organising the Embodied Values Series and Sensory Worlds Conference

* Put your headphones on *

The audiovisual-walk was created in November for George Square, an urban park in Edinburgh Central Campus. The piece is a creatively mediated record of some of the moments of change that were taking place in the space at that time, is a non-taxonomic collection of visual and aural memories. The data was collated during 2 weeks in Autumn, before the season changed into gelid Winter.

The piece requires a handheld projector and a good pair of headphones. The piece is a composition of rattling sounds of leaves, springs and instruments and other textures, onto which the visual material is mapped and patch-worked. To start the piece the participant is outside the park premises, few meteres away from the door. The piece starts playing and the individual adventures into the park at dusk. The lack of zenithal light allows the projectors to function as a torch for the exploration of the park, and the textural qualities of the space are revealed not only visually but sonically.

The piece is a psycho-geographical investigation that aims to open new understandings of natural urban spaces and the phenomenological experience of walking, of moving across an everyday life space.