The Wind at Byaduk is a result of a creative residency hosted by CreativePeoplePlace, on Gunditjmara land.
How to send long-distance ‘feelings’
The Wind at Byaduk comprises home objects that act as vessels of affective telepresence; used to convey not an empirical measurement of a remote place, but to remind us of a place we know.
The first part of the work is a remotely-installed weather station, streaming weather data in realtime–the presence of wind, the UV Index, and incidental sound from the Byaduk Old Church. This data makes its way to an Internet server that shares this stream with the artefacts wirelessly.
The main artefacts are two old glass bottles, discarded in the town of Byaduk, located in the Western District of Victoria. The differently-shaped profiles of the bottles create different tonal qualities of sound as air moves over them. Matching electric fans sit over the top of the glass bottles, articulating their height ever so slightly and modulating the volume of the wind-like sounds emerging from the bottles. The live weather data is used to control how quickly the fans and articulating brass stems run and move…manifesting the wind at Byaduk.
Background
The Finding Byaduk creative residency is an experimental project, aimed at exploring speculations around the phenomenology of digital data representations of a landscape, and the design of interfaces and embodied expressions. Part of this process also adapts ethnographic methodologies in articulating and capturing visual descriptions of the site. The creative brief is developed as a thought experiment with ‘affective telepresence’ – finding means to remotely convey the qualities of a place using environmental sensors and exploring poetic roles that digital connected technologies might play through the design of embodied expressions and/or interactions. These resulting artefacts document the phenomenological nuances and development journey of creative practice, and in so doing, contribute discourse towards speculative design practices and interrelated methodologies in creative practice.
2019: Journal Publication
Khoo, Chuan. “Finding Byaduk: Field Notes.” Drawing On: Journal of Architectural Research by Design, Vol. 3 (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/9gs9kg18
2018: Conference Publication
Khoo, Chuan. “Finding Byaduk: Thinking Objects as Prototypes of Affective Telepresence With Digital Data.” Annual Design Research Conference (ADR18) (2018): 373–88.
2018 Exhibition: ADR18
Khoo, Chuan. “Finding Byaduk: Thinking Objects as Prototypes of Affective Telepresence With Digital Data.” Annual Design Research Conference (ADR18) (2018): 39–41, the University of Sydney, Australia.