Shomit
Barua
Standing Wave
Commissioned by Bloomberg Philanthropies + City of Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture
2025 Los Olivos Park, 30ft x 15ft x 15ft
Site-responsive public art installation with real-time sensing and solar/environmentally-reactive soundscape.
Standing Wave is a public art installation funded by the Bloomberg Group and the City of Phoenix Arts & Culture office as an experimental response to extreme urban heat in Phoenix, Arizona. Standing Wave employs a collection of primitive, photovoltaic sonic modules to create a distributed soundscape in a public park. Modulated by environmental cues like heat, wind, and the changes in shade as the sun passes through the sky, these sonic critters emit purely analog electronically-synthesized bird calls and insect-like articulations that become entangled with the pre-existing urban acoustic ecology.
Standing Wave is part of series of immersive interventions that embraces the human presence and urban environments. This practice, dubbed "Hyperwilding," uses eco-mimicry to rewrite the spaces inherently influenced by human activity. “Rewilding” refers to conservation that emphasizes remediation of natural spaces through minimizing human impact. Conversely, ‘hyperwilding’ is the practice of crafting psuedo-wilderness simulations as intentionally artificial constructions and dissociative contexts. This is a direct, embedded response to the artificiality imposed by urban environments.
Standing Wave is coupled with workshops offered to students in detention and ecology-related clubs and classes at local high schools to train in a mindfulness protocol called "Environmental Listening," developed by renowned acoustic ecologist, Garth Paine. This talk will examine the juxtaposition of natural and synthesized sounds, the psychoacoustic effects of stacking "surrogacies" (Spectromorphology, Denis Smalley), and "Environmental Listening" as a strategy for training the next generation of city-planners and policymakers to recognize our inextricable relationships with--and to promote stewardship of--the environment.