Tim is an artist working with sound at Newcastle University (UK), creates augmented soundwalks, and designs performances for high-voltage devices. During his fellowship at the Collegium, he is supported by Hannes Rickli, Professor at the Institute for Contemporary Art Research, ZHdK. Meanwhile, Tuncay is an engineer manipulating droplets to improve drug delivery at Monash University in Melbourne (AU). The similarities between their interests may not be obvious right away. Yet, the two started to experiment together soon after they met at the Collegium and work now towards an art installation later this year.
Tim Shaw: For me, as an artist working with sound, it’s interesting to transform sound from one type of media into another. I have been interested in the different ways to visualize sound, also how visual media can also be transformed into sound. In our creative experiments, Tuncay and I bring sound into a visual form and then turn it back into sound. The next step could be to feed the system back on itself, to create a feedback loop. This could result in something surprising and emergent, but we haven’t tried that yet.
TS: There is actually a long history of turning colors, shapes, and light into sound, for example many artists and musicians experimented with making color organs to produce sound and light. I also think of the movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which a so-called ANS synthesizer was used that can transform patterns of light into sound. It worked by scratching a drawing into a black pane of glass, and the resulting image was fed into the synthesizer, which rendered the interaction between light and dark into sound textures.
TA: This was new to me. But from our discussions and creative experimental approach, several ideas have emerged. For example, I realized that the digital ANS synthesizer might also be interesting for a lot of people from my field. When you feed videos of droplets into the synthesizer, you can trigger acoustic signals in real-time that provide a reliable tool to detect the droplet in a very specific area.
TS: I agree with Tuncay. It’s very helpful to approach a place like the Collegium with very open-ended experimental ideas. My projects have enough fluidity and openness to input and can react to new situations. For me, the thought was very much: “Let’s share our practices, let’s do quick experiments and follow the curiosity, and let’s see what happens.” It is about serendipity and meeting different people.
TS: But you can’t force it. I was once part of a program that was designed to make people collaborate with each other. And it basically made people not want to work together. Because it was too formalized and structured, and people were top-down assigned to problems and then expected to solve these through collaboration. That was very stifling. The setting at the Collegium is much more conducive because no one is forced to do anything collaboratively, but it creates a lot of opportunities for that to happen naturally. The Collegium is more environmental rather than structural or conceptual. You create an environment in which people find it easy to talk to each other and collaborate. Without the Collegium, I would have stayed at the ZHdK and worked with other artists or done my own projects. Similarly, Tuncay may have mainly interacted with other engineers. When people start to share their practices and interests within a common space, then unexpected encounters and projects can happen.
TS: Oh, right. There was a panel on knowledge, the voice, and silence. I went there because I am interested in sound, and silence is obviously an important part of that. It was there that we talked with each other for the first time and learned about our mutual interests. It was one of the many opportunities to meet people from both inside and outside the Collegium. So, if we hadn’t talked there, we probably would have met in another context.
TA: For this, having a common physical space, the building, is crucial. You can wander around an observatory, and casual encounters just happen, which are incredibly important besides the more organized meetings with fellows. It’s not easy to create an environment like this. But it was just the right one for us. And I think it is—and can be—for many others, too.