The Flight of the Seaswallow

The Sea Swallow Project is a telematic audiovisual improvised performance incorporating live data streams of location, climate and physical movement from networked sensors in Sydney, Braunschweig and New York. Capturing distributed moments in time as source material for live improvised performances,  each performer is contributing site specific sound, images and text as well as climatic data such as temperature and humidity to the database. The networked ensemble moves through the telematic spherical environment containing data from various locations via GPS coordinates by manipulating 3D hands viewable on screen. This triggers a collage of audiovisual content for improvised interpretation and response as the ensemble navigates through them. Audiences at the performance space and online experience the networked performers moving throughout the 3D tele-environment in improvised performances responding to sound objects as they appear and cluster.

The title of this work refers to an episode of Bruce Chatwin´s book „The Songlines“ where he mentiones an old tramp who tells him about the arctic tern or sea swallow. This bird, in need to have as much daylight as possible for hunting food, flies every year from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again. And this idea of a need to travel accompanied the blackhole-factory´s working style since years.

With the SeaSwallow Project our attempt was to discuss about migratory restlessnes as a driving element in the personal histories. A starting point to talk about places and identity, about intercultural encounters, migration and the inherent social and political aspects. For the performance we have set up a  multi modal platform to exchange in realtime from three different continents in different timezones. This construction gives us the possibility to discuss, to play live improvised music and to evoke a collection of fieldrecordings, sounds and visuals from a shared database which contains memories of the performers. The data base, being projected as a virtual globe contains places positioned by the help of GPS data, which are visualised as spheres to which we can fly. The spheres contain the collection of audiovisual information, appearing when we come close. During the flights through the virtual 3D world a collage of  the stored contents arises as an improvised interpretation.

The performers are connected via eJamming, an online platform to play music in realtime  together. Beyond that they use MAX/MSP network patches written by Martin Slawig to exchange sensor data and video.

The SeaSwallow sensor kit: Arduino with sensors for light, temperature and motion. Each collaborator is using one unit, sending the data over the internet to the performance space.