© 2020 Stefan Nussbaumer.
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in­the­noise­of­the­night­and­the­still­of­the­day

I have learnt, meanwhile, that I can play with VideOSC in very peculiar, non-rational way. But what has come up as a probably even more interesting question is yet the meaning of “control”. A mobile phone is a computer. Hasn’t the idea behind computers always been “control”?

inthenoiseofthenightandthestilloftheday was my contribution to Klangmanifeste 2019, an annual transdiciplinary festival between visual and acoustic art. I was especially invited for my work on VideOSC, my little Android app, that allows me to control sound and other media by visual information, namely, the colors coming in from a mobile phone’s camera.

I understand that people get curious when they here how my app works and what it does. I myself was wondering for years what my idea would “sound” like before I actually built a first prototype. Meanwhile I found out for myself that what’s most confusing about it is the use of the term “control” as such for this kind of thing. When I first connected it to my sound generation process, it felt much like everything exploded and felt apart immediately.

echoraum himmel

I’m not sure how and why the topic “sky” came up. Anyway, I finally decided to mount a mobile phone to the balcony in the courtyard, outside the exhibition space, that was constantly watching the sky throughout the festival, controlling the generation of a sound stream that could be listened to by the visitors through headphones.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that the sound produced in the stream wouldn’t vary extremely a lot – images of an average sky over Vienna tend to spread over a not so big variation of colors (mostly grey to light blue). Nevertheless recordings turned out to be different from day to day. An acoustic weather report for the time of the festival.
So to say.

A recording of the sunrise over Echoraum on March 20th 2019