Forest

Forest is an interactive sonic painting. This piece gives audiences the ability to hear the sound of their desired forest by touching the painting of a forest. It is usually forbidden to touch the paintings in a gallery; people have to see the images in the way the artist wanted them to.  I wanted to give my audiences the ability to experience an avant-garde gallery. I wanted them to interact with a painting in a gallery and to be part of an art piece. In fact each audience would change this piece to their unique way.

The painting is a view of a forest with a river, trees, birds, crows and forest floor. People would hear their desired forest sound out of that forest by touching different components of the painting on the canvas. Also, they could manipulate volume, pitch, and speed of the sounds using the knobs beside the painting. Each person could hear the sound they could imagine for that forest and make their own story out of it. It could be a mysterious forest with creepy sounds or a calm forest with soothing sounds. Also I chose to have this painting in just black and white. Therefore people could imagine their desired forest while making its sounds and would not get distracted with an already colored painting. Audiences could color the painting in their imagination in the best color that would match with their feelings, and their desired forest sounds.

In this project I was inspired by Sophia Brueckner who has done musical painting with conductive ink before. I drew the whole forest with the same ink. Behind the canvas, I used some touch sensors connected to Teensy board. Each touch sensor was connected to the painting (conductive inks) by a nail. I used Max and Arduino coding languages for this project.

Here is a short video of some audiences interacting with the piece.