Art's Birthday: Songs of Place

Description:

This performance was programmed as part of a multi-day celebration of Art’s Birthday that coincided with the 100th anniversary of radio. Local and international artists used sound, video, robotics, poetry, images, and performance to celebrate and deconstruct utopian ideas of network, radio, and places.  

Steve Heimbecker performed media artwork, Songs of Place Vancouver (2004) and Songs of Place Springwater (2004), with a live remixing of the quadraphonic audio.

The Songs of Place series is mathematical audio and video mappings of different cities. Heimbecker studied the geography of each locale and mapped it with multiple channels of sound and video. Vancouver focuses on the water with the city placed fleetingly within the ocean. 
Springwater focuses on the fields that surround this small prairie town. 

A four-channel audio strobing technique took the listener through many locations in the given environment simultaneously. Sometimes the soundtrack was an intense barrage and other times everything went almost quiet and the listener could pick out the individual points within the map. 

Video documentation available upon request.