Our space, or my space

I've had a busy week working on The Big Room project, as more spaces have been listened to, recorded and sent in. Highlights of the week have to include the unusual workspace of a airplane cockpit, the steady drones and hums of a Beech 1900d, with some surprising, subtle shifts in tonality. Another recording shares the acoustic of the contributor's workplace, the Naturkundemuseum in Berlin - a mammoth, echoic chamber several stories tall, with class trip conversations wafting up in long reverberating waves to the offices. Scott contributed the soundtrack of his garage in Florida, where the heat is almost tangible as airplane drones, doppler car drivebys and buzzing insects merge slowly into one another, then separate once more.

I'm starting to incorporate all these recordings into the final interface - this work which plays on the unique transience of sound - this ability to capture and displace spaces, while still retaining links to it's origin, as we listen and perceive it once again. In some ways this is 'invisible architecture', this possibility of erecting new spaces in a moment and having them disappear without a trace just as quickly. If we combined some of the spaces mentioned previously, what does this new place, this imagined place, sound like? Can we splice these sound fragments together as we listen back to them, creating a single new space, or are these audio 'markings' too strong, too defined?

Photo and work credit: Mirror Displacement, Robert Smithson 1969