Echolocation

Wassily Kandinsky, Several Circles (1926)


-This is an update to my previous studio exploration post-

Thinking further about the idea of place, and how sound contributes to it, I'm looking more into echolocation. Echolocation, as used by bats, reconstructs the closest objects first and foremost in the bats' navigation. As of now, scientists can't show that bats actually form a visual image of some sort in their mind from the auditory data they collect. In that case, it could be called a "cross-modal transfer". The information crosses from the auditory mode to the visual mode.

That's largely what I'm trying to do with my aesthetic exploration of the concept of place. Human beings to some extent already use echolocation. In my piece I'm focusing on a what I'm calling, "A cross-modal sense of place through technology". By using a QR code in a painting of a bat I hope to bridge not only a representation/non-representational divide in imagery, but also a more directly sensory one by using visual information to link to auditory information. Kandinsky is perhaps instructive here in that he attempted to show sound in visual form.