Fractured

'Fractured' presents the culmination of a month’s joint residency at Brocket Gallery with Ashleigh May Thompson. It combines visual art with spacialised, interactive sound. The sound is itself derived from the artworks, creating a multisensory experience to deepen the metaphysical perception of the work.

Thompson’s hand manipulated works are monochrome; black intaglio ink on tissue paper. Her ongoing series, 'Fractures', attempts to encourage the viewer to question the work’s materiality and methodologies, drawing on the micro and macro, such as representations of infinite space, cross sections of bone, natural surfaces and optical processes.

I used digital scans of Thompson’s work as a raw material, treated as sonograms that were reverse-engineered into sound using specialised software. These sounds were then subjected to further processing and manipulation until I reached a final set of audio files that I deemed really suited Thompson's works.

I built an iOS app to continuously play the final audio files, in a way that would cycle through them infinitely. An iPad was installed in the space, which was running the app. I gave the app rules about which files could be sounded simultaneously and which could not be, and left the rest of the music generation to the device, allowing it to make its own 'choices'. The final stage was adding an interface through which people people could add subtle effects to the sound, by dragging their finger on the iPad screen.

Click here to learn more about the "Fractured' iOS application.