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The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room was a collaborative artwork created for the Fine Arts - Technology Art Studio course I took in my 4th year of an engineering degree. This was a unique experience because it teamed up fine arts students with engineers to see what could come out of these two diverse groups of people. For this project I was teamed up with two fine arts students, the lovely Leah Morrow and the dapper Don Duff-McCracken. The piece incorporated serial-port control of lighting, realtime audio mixing, and motion tracking using a webcam. All of this was neatly handled in Processing, a great open source programming language. Here’s the artist statement for our piece:

We spend most of our lives waiting. Waiting for something to happen and then waiting for the something else to happen. This waiting time, the time between these purportedly (and hopefully) significant events is meaningless. It is the stuff between things. It is filler in our lives. It is the time we kill. The Waiting Room inverts this common experience of waiting. The Waiting Room honours the experience of ‘the wait’ and allows the viewer to reflect upon this time. The Waiting Room embraces 'the wait' which becomes both the journey and the end and redefines and recontextualizes the space that we call The Waiting Room. Our experiences of waiting can frequently be distilled down to the sounds of waiting – the tick of a clock, the drip of a faucet, or the suppressed cough of a stranger may be the only sensory experiences for us to focus on as we wait for that ‘something’ (or ‘anything’) to happen. As the sound travels into our ear it travels a spiral path, a spiral path that is reflective of many of our journeys into the space of the space where we wait – the waiting room.

Part of T'Art06

Try out a virtual version of The Waiting Room and check out the source code. There are a few mp3 files to load, so please be patient (and enjoy the wait) while it loads. There is also some more info on the technical aspect of how we actually did everything.

When a viewer approached the piece they either found the room completely empty, or completely occupied by another person (and then had to wait). A single set of headphones were mounted at the entrance of the room and made the piece a solitary experience. When the viewer put on the headphones and walked into the room their position was reflected in the overhead lighting. The lights were only intended as a subtle cue to indicate the possibility of interacting with the room; the focus of the piece was the sound being played over their headphones, the sounds of waiting. Inside the room there were six focal points of sound. As a viewer approached the focal point of one particular sound the other noises faded into the background and when a viewer was standing between two sounds the recordings blended together. Standing in the exact center of the room meant that you were an equal distance from all the focal points and thus heard all six sounds over the headphones. The focal points were not marked in the room, this was done to make people explore the space (the sound space) and experience the real-time mixtures they could create simply by moving about. Recordings included a turn blinker, the arrival of a train (that was late), a beautiful recording of pacing on slightly sandy concrete, a coffee shop, a young girl singing (kids wait much differently than adults), and the low machine hum of an empty building. There is so much beauty and information in sound, something that we often forget when we only focus on the visual world.

And here are some pictures of the actual piece installed...

The actual room itself was constructed in a spiral shape so no door was needed to 'seal' someone off from the outside world. To construct the walls we made a lightweight timber frame and then covered that with upholstery batting. Because the batting was semi-transparent it was a really great material to use, the interior lighting leaked through to the outside beautifully.

Speaking of the lighting, here is the best shot of the lights (it's hard to photograph a piece that is mostly sonic).

And what would a technology art piece without a giant fire hazard (and my precariously perched powerbook)!