Dave Riedstra upcoming presentation

PhD student David Riedstra is giving an online talk on Haptic Box as part of Piksel Festival in Norway: they're still finalising the schedule, but it should Sunday Nov 20 in the evening. Here's the abstract for the talk.

Haptic Box is a DIY tactile sound sculpture – though it might be more of an event score, it can be used as an instrument, has some attributes of a composition, and my own build is getting to be a nuisance. The physical thing is a wooden box with stereo transducer input and output and all the related electronics onboard. As a sound-sculpture, the piece uses low-frequency feedback to entangle a “listener” into its algorithmically unfolding process through the listener’s handling of the surfaces which the tactile vibrational feedback plays out on. As an instrument, a pair of stereo phono jacks and related routing switches provide the possibility to use the box as a character input, output, or filter, or for feedback with external processing.

This presentation will introduce Haptic Box and dig into some implications of what it means to DIY a sound sculpture. By saturating the experience of “the piece itself” with the listener’s history as its builder, Haptic Box intermingles the would-be detached and transcendental aesthetics of the fine art frame with the more involved experiences of gathering and manipulating material and software. This mixed relationship can lead to a feeling of responsibility toward the object as well as a broader appreciation for materials and the labour of making. But what happens with the object “after” it has performed its role as a sound sculpture? Thinking with Yuriko Saito, Sarah Ahmed, and N. Katherine Hayles, I suggest that living with an object like Haptic Box can provide everyday aesthetic experiences of distributed cognition and socio-material feedback processes. In the spirit of these thinkers, I will discuss my own personal history with the project and the box that I built to further suggest an aesthetics of entangled ongoingness. Living with self-built projects, maintaining them, and contributing to others are ways in which DIY, FOSS, and open knowledge communities can shift cultural mindsets to more equitable and sustainable patterns through an aesthetics of flaws and flows.