Together When We Are Apart
The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the incredible power of communication technologies to keep us informed, connected, and socially engaged during long periods of social isolation. The same technologies have inherent tendencies to increase our sense of alienation as we “consume” content, flip through screens and disengage from social interactions, obligations and projects the more we focus on our devices as transmission media.
Together While We Are Apart is a Do-it-together installation, composition and play space that gently demands that we move outside, physically distance ourselves from one another yet collaborate in an extended musical and ambient sound exploration of the built and natural environment. In its first iteration, TWWAA consisted of 24 QR codes located throughout the city of Saint John which triggered pre-recorded environmental and compositional sounds activated by participants’s smart phones. The installation was active from August 20 – 27 2020 during the Third Shift Experimental Art festival in Saint John New Brunswick.
Participants engaged in a participatory, asynchronous performance and composition of a set of community-based audio artifacts using audio recorded from the Saint John environment, along with electronic music files composed for the installation processed and played on the participants’ cell phones. As other participants triggered sonic events in various locations around the city listeners and players could change the audio triggers on their devices to listen “together” in an online process of composition and performance allowing us to think differently about what it means to listen and to make sounds and music in and across space and through time during this unique historic moment.