Justine McLisky, the MCA’s Education Coordinator (Youth and Outreach Programs) is travelling to Wellington to make a presentation about the Good Vibrations project at the 2007 ANZAAE Conference.

She’ll be showing snippets from the documentary video produced by Darrin Baker, as well as explaining the process of working towards such a complex art and education project.

If you find yourself in Wellington, get along to the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, on Wednesday July 4th, 2.30pm.

Bruce’s diagram of how the caravan works. (Birds eye view.) Click on the image to see it in LARGE size!

The ears (the spiral shapes in the drawing) are in front of the caravan (to the top of the diagram) - they collect sounds from the environment surrounding the front of the van.

The rectangle at the top of the drawing shows the area within the scope of the caravan’s “eyes”.

The dotted area at the rear of the Caravan shows a schematic idea of how the process of “gathering sights and sounds” will work. The students go on a “wandering workshop” with Bruce and Michael, working as a team to collect interesting sounds from the local school environment.

One student acts as the “soundkeeper” with a mp3 recorder, while the other students listen, suggest sounds to record, and often strike objects to see what kinds of sounds they make when they resonate.

Several students carry digital cameras, documenting the process of recording sounds, but also taking direct photographs of the objects or zones which have been recorded.

Later the sound recordings, together with the images of the sound-sources, will be loaded into the Good Vibrations computers, and will become part of the database of images and sounds which are able to be activated by users who play with the caravan’s interface.

Thus the expedition to collect sights and sounds results in the students actively contributing content to the caravan – they are participants in the making of the work, and are later able to identify their own contributions (the images and audio recordings from their own environments).