Beyond the Visual

Week-long workshop at Vision, the 2018 OSSA Architecture Festival, Łodz

Constantinos Miltiadis, Gerriet K. Sharma

Oct 13, 2018 teaching, spatial audio

Outline & documentation

Full-week workshop in the context of the 2018 Architectural Festival Vision, upon invitation from the Polish Association of Architecture Students (OSSA). October 13-21 2018, Łodz, Poland. The workshop was designed to focus on auditory aspects of spatial cognition, and included the participation of spatial audio composer and sound artist Gerriet K. Sharma in the first half. The workshop resulted in a collectively-developed 10-minute VR experience of spaces ‘heard’ in blindfolded listening sessions of the spatial audio piece ‘grrawe’ (Gerriet K. Sharma 2010).


Type	Workshop; extra-academic
Context	OSSA Architecture Festival 2018 ‘Vision’
Duration	Full week (13-20.10.2018)
Participants	7 (architecture students)
Output	Collective VR application (HTC Vive)
Presentation & exhibition	Art Inkubator, Łodz, 20.10.2018

Documentation

A Research Catalogue exposition that provides an extensive documentation and discussion of the workshop’s curriculum, process, aims and outcomes was published in:
- Miltiadis, Constantinos, and Gerriet K. Sharma. ‘Beyond the Visual - A Research Curriculum for Explorations in Spatiotemporal Environments’. Journal for Artistic Research, no. 24 (27 September 2021). https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/815001/815002.
A conventional, non-VR version of the experience for Windows and OSX is archived on itch.io.

Workshop information

Workshop brief

This workshop intends to explore architectural sensibilities beyond the “Visual” that the event title suggests. Starting from acoustic field experiments, participants will be called to analyze the -emergent- sonic dimension of the built environment. Developing an awareness of the essential role that sound plays in our perception and cognition of space, we will experiment with an architectural composition that uses sound objects as building material. Contrary to the conceptual sphere of architecture which excludes such phenomena, we propose an approach intended to deepen the understanding of the non-visual aesthetics embedded in architecture. Introducing readings from various disciplines and working with both temporal and spatial digital media, the workshop intends to experiment with the spatiotemporal production of our lived environments, and eventually develop such prototypes in the virtual reality medium.

Workshop process

The workshop began with readings and listening exercises for developing sensibilities and vocabularies on aural aspects of spatial cognition. The second half of the workshop started with blindfolded listening sessions of the spatial audio piece ‘grrawe‘ (Gerriet K. Sharma), where participants were asked to visualize the spaces and environments they heard into sketches. Eventually the sketches were transposed to individual Unity scenes and assembled into a 10-minute VR experience of 8 different spatiotemporal environments that follow the piece.

Lectures

The Aesthetics of Presence in Inconstructible Spaces I & II – public lectures by Constantinos Miltiadis and Gerriet K. Sharma in the context of the OSSA 2018 festival. October 15 at EC1, Łodz.