Awash depicts the life, color, and environment of the High Desert. The kinetic sound sculpture emanates audio from the region, while flowing as a singular mechanical wave overhead. Awash, like the High Desert, is shaped by many forces interacting in complex ways; the work is ecological – physical movement interacts with sonic vibrations. Sounds interact with the physical environment. Visual elements intermingle with acoustic elements.
The High Desert Museum commissioned Harmonic Laboratory for the work as part of its Desert Reflections 2019 exhibit. The exhibit went on to win the 2019 Charles Redd Center for Western Studies Award for Exhibition Excellence. Press release for the award.
Jon Bellona, electronics, software, field recording, Skinner church organ recording, sound editing, visual design, engineering
John Park, kinetics, visual design, engineering, schematics
Jeremy Schropp, field recording, visual design, engineering
Kevin Davis, Skinner church organ recording
City Synth transforms the city of Eugene into a musical instrument. By transmitting video feeds from multiple locations to a central location downtown that interprets movement and color into sound, the cityscape becomes a soundscape. The project offers the community a playful way to learn about and interact with the gigabit network in downtown Eugene. The project was a month long installation housed in downtown Eugene, OR. Project partners include South Eugene Robotics Team (SERT) and XS Media. The project was funded by a Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund Grant.
Artists involved in the project:
Jon Bellona, sound design, coding, project lead
John Park, coding and visual design
Jeremy Schropp, interface design and construction
Precipitation 3 is one of a series of musical compositions written for 26 clock chimes as part of the sound art installation, Aqua•litative. With my Precipitation series, I treat the electromechanical structure as musical instrument, navigating through sound with the syntactical construction of code. Compositions played by the sculpture evoke precipitation data of California weather stations by cycling through bits of its data. These cycles create emergent sonic patterns in a continuously evolving play between density and rhythm. Movement flows as collapsing waves, additively striking a cybernetic balance between natural order and mechanic motion.
Aqua•litative is a kinetic installation that renders multiple data sets of California’s water history into a physical experience. The work correlates natural factors contributing to California’s water shortages, outlining the serpentine narrative of water through the translation of data into kinetic movement and acoustic sound.
Selector is a live audio-visual performance that uses algorithms to select between various sonic processes. Some of these processes include the selection of audio segments, rapidly skipping like a malfunctioning CD player. Each audio process triggers pulses of projected light. Selector combines the generative selection of audio with the selection of visual code in a tightly synchronized display of sound and light.
Cloche are 3D printed objects instilled with movement data to create combinatorial structures of natural patterns. Motion capture technology was used to extract physical movement from its occurrence in the physical world, recording dynamic qualities like speed, direction, weight, and intensity. Moving back through the virtual filter to the physical world, movement data re-animates a different body– a multiplicitous arc in humans forms. The analog-digital-analog processes filters presence, stripping movement of some information and endowing it with others.
Like movement, sound traverses a similar filtering process. Recordings of 3D object printing, capturing the movement of a form’s creation, are processed digitally and re-amplified in the space. The sounds continue to be filtered by the shape and contour of our physical bodies and the acoustics of the room. The physical-virtual-physical translation process is both known and physical, and at the same time other and immaterial.
Jon Bellona, sound design Brad Garner, movement design John Park, movement capture, print, and visual design
Aqua•litative is a kinetic installation that renders multiple data sets related to California’s water history into movement and sound. The installation displays climatological data as a chronological narrative of water in the state by transforming water data into acoustic sounds (ringing of clock chimes) and physical movement (motors moving arms of balsa wood) shown in a gallery space. Precipitation data creates sonic patterns, analogous to rain droplets, in a continuously evolving play between density and rhythm.
Aqua•litative is by Jon Bellona, John Park, and John Reagan. http://aqualitative.org The installation is part of an Environmental Resilience and Sustainability Fellowship, funded in part by the Jefferson Trust and the University of Virginia Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs.
Aqua•litative installed at the Duke Gallery in Harrisonburg, VA Arduino board layout for the installation.
CarbonFeed takes your most recent 200 tweets and turns them into a minute loop, a song that changes over your Twitter lifetime. Every time you tweet you generate 0.02g/C02 [1]. Don’t worry too much though. Listening to your one-minute song will eat up roughly 2.86 grams/C02e in electricity, servers, and embodied computer emissions [2].
The project #CarbonFeed directly challenges the popular notion that virtuality is disconnected from reality. Through sonifying Twitter feeds and correlating individual tweets with a physical data visualization in public spaces, artists Jon Bellona and John Park invite viewers to hear and see the environmental cost of online behavior and its supportive physical infrastructure.
CarbonFeed works by taking in realtime tweets from Twitter users around the world. Based on a customizable set of hashtags, the work listens for specific tweets. The content of these incoming tweets generates a realtime sonic composition. An installation-based visual counterpart of compressed air being pumped through tubes of water further provides a physical manifestation of each tweet.
Human Chimes transforms users into sound that bounce between other users inside the space. The sounds infer interaction with all other participants inside the space. Participants perceive themselves and others as transformed visual components projected onto the front wall as well as sonic formulations indicating where they are. As people move, the sounds move and change to show changing personal interactions. As more users enter the space, more sounds are layered upon the existing body. In this way, sound patterns, like our relationships with others, continuously evolve.
The social work dynamically tracking users’ locations in real time, transcoding participants as sounds that pan around the space according to the participants’ positions. Human Chimes enables users to create, control, and interact with sound and visuals in real time. The piece uses a multimedia experience to ignite our curiosity and deepen our playful attitude with the world around us.
The work was commissioned in part by the University of Oregon and the city of Eugene, Oregon. The work was presented as part of the (sub)Urban Projections film festival: Nov. 9, 2011.
(sub)Urban Projections Film Festival wanted to include live projection bombing in downtown Eugene, OR, and I was commissioned to create an interactive installation that allows a user to paint graffiti upon any projected surface. The human interface uses TouchOSC on an iPad or iPhone, which drives my graffiti computer software. The work was presented each night of the (sub)Urban Projections festival: Nov. 9, 16, 23; 2011, the WhiteBox gallery in Portland, OR Dec. 10, 2011, and the second (sub)Urban Projections festival: Nov. 7, 11, 14 2012.
