Dave Riedstra
Haptic Box is a DIY self-constructed tactile sound sculpture – though it might be more of an event score, it can be used as an instrument, has some attributes of a composition, and my own build is getting to be a nuisance. The physical thing is a wooden box with stereo transducer input and output and all the related electronics onboard. As a sound-sculpture, the piece uses low-frequency feedback to entangle a “listener” into its algorithmically unfolding process through the listener’s handling of the surfaces which the tactile vibrational feedback plays out on. As an instrument, a pair of stereo phono jacks and related routing switches provide the possibility to use the box as a character input, output, or filter, or for feedback with external processing.
This presentation will introduce Haptic Box and dig into some implications of what it means to DIY a sound sculpture. By saturating the experience of “the piece itself” with the listener’s history as its builder, Haptic Box intermingles the would-be detached and transcendental aesthetics of the fine art frame with the more involved experiences of gathering and manipulating material and software. This mixed relationship can lead to a feeling of responsibility toward the object as well as a broader appreciation for materials and the labour of making. But what happens with the object “after” it has performed its role as a sound sculpture? Thinking with Yuriko Saito, Sarah Ahmed, and N. Katherine Hayles, I suggest that living with an object like Haptic Box can provide everyday aesthetic experiences of distributed cognition and socio-material feedback processes. In the spirit of these thinkers, I will discuss my own personal history with the project and the box that I built to further suggest an aesthetics of entangled ongoingness. Living with self-built projects, maintaining them, and contributing to others are ways in which DIY, FOSS, and open knowledge communities can shift cultural mindsets to more equitable and sustainable patterns through an aesthetics of flaws and flows.
Dave Riedstra (b. 1989, Brampton, Ontario, Canada)
I work with sound, mostly quiet, in a variety of modalities including composition, sound art and installation, double bass performance, and code. Focusing variously on material, process, experience, feedback, and transduction, I try to offer an immediate sensation of engagement with entangled environments, networks, assemblages, and milieux. Though facilitating these aspects of experience has long been my main goal, recently I have been increasingly considering how co-composition and sympoiesis play out in the processes of my own practices. This has led to additional interest in debris, an image of art as byproduct, and a transient conception of author, performer, listener, and maker to match an object which looks more like a process.
I engage with open source software, hardware, and art as a means of fostering non-capitalist creative, restorative, and sustaining practices. I develop a few open software and hardware projects and I release music online as an unsteady stream of detritus scrap recordings from my electronic sound practice, alongside code snippets and patch notes. Find me online as @dried on various platforms or through my website at https://daveriedstra.com.