HEAR’N SCREENS

Title: Hear’n Screen

Context: 2020 quarantine, which pushes everything into virtual.

Topic/theme: Sound of virtual site.

What is site?

Site could be understood as a physical space, the context we are in, stuffs we see around us, an abstract location, and/or what our sensory perceives.

So virtual connections could be a site.

What about the sound in that virtual site?

For example, in a cafe, where we gathering around, we constantly and inevitably hear the sound of people talking, coffee grinding, the back ground music chosen by the cafe owner, and all kinds of other ambient sounds.

But what about virtual site?

What do we hear when we go virtual?

What are the differences between the virtual display and the physical world currently?

And what is special to the virtual world and what are shared with our physical space?

……

Set up:

A website displaying a sound file.

Experience:

By clicking the play button, you are not playing to yourself, but playing to others.

I frequently got annoyed by people talking around me when I try to focus and loved how I could just turn off the sound in virtual world. But surprisingly, I was actually not given as much control as I thought in the virtual world, especially to sounds.

Social medias, for example, don’t play the sound automatically for videos.

Also, you could not really turn off the “sound” shouting in your head about the comments from online.

It’s a story about control.

Content:

WHAT COULD I SAY? :

Me trying to stop the feedback loop in a zoom meeting.