Interview with Mark Shepard

You are viewing an unstyled version of this page. Donning headphones, city dwellers and commuters have been re-shaping the urban soundscape ever since the arrival of the .

A few years ago, suggested to go beyond this attitude and share those sounds with the people who might pass by the same spaces. His project is called and has been presented at festivals and events all over the world, from in Barcelona to in San Jose, from in Manchester to in New York.
However, the TSG represents only a small part of 's activities.

His cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of emergent network cultures. His research focuses on the impact of mobile and pervasive technologies on architecture and urbanism. He is currently of Architecture and Media Study at the , State University of New York, where he is a co-director of the .

Your bio say that you're "an artist and architect whose cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network cultures." Do you regard architecture, film and new media as three different fields or does your work encompass them as one?
My work moves between these different fields.

I come from a background in architecture, which I've studied and practiced (intermittently) over the past two decades. After becoming fed-up with the state of the architectural "profession" in the early 90s, I returned to graduate school and began to work with film as both a medium and a conceptual model to address aspects of spatial experience that elude conventions of architectural representation.
What began as a naive interest in working with time and duration as "material" (qualities of sound, light, movement) led to broader questions concerning how perception is conditioned through the technological apparatus.

I was interested in conditions of vacancy as a limit condition within urban environments, and the challenges involved with modeling the forces producing this condition. The work explored the limits of empirical representations, and the political ramifications of the fact that what architects and urban designers perceive and value about a specific site was to a certain extent limited by their ability to represent it. and are two examples.

Moving between film and architecture (and by extension, cinema and urbanism) provided a means to analyze and critique the techniques by which the built environment is projected and shaped, and in turn, shapes those who inhabit it.
At about the same time, I began to work with new media, mostly as a means to explore non-linear temporal structures and interactivity. A little later, I founded a new media design studio called together with Carlos Tejada.

What started out as as a means to support independent art projects (by freelancing for other artists and designers) grew into a collaborative network of artists, architects, programmers and technologists developing new media environments for primarily non-profit organizations in the arts, design and education communities in New York. Much of the early work with dotsperinch involved designing and programming online digital archives and interactive exhibits for museums. Projects such as 360degrees.

org, SonicMemorial.org and CrossingTheBLVD.org provided a pretext to investigate both conceptual design directions and fairly pragmatic development issues involved with creating digital archives and open content systems.

Later work, such as , an installation by A.M. Hoch at the , explored notions of a "habitable cinema" and involved the integration of sound, the moving image and a mobile observer with things like proximity sensors, mechanical actuators, and embedded microcontrollers.

My current work is more preoccupied with understanding computing as an environment than seeing it as a tool or a set of techniques. When computational intelligence becomes embedded in (or distributed throughout) the built environment, the basis of architecture and urbanism is radically altered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the major cities today.

Looking at the impact of mobile and pervasive computing on architecture and urbanism involves rethinking received categories of public/private, individual/mass, interior/exterior, attention/distraction, virtual/actual. I find I'm constantly having to move between different fields to get at the key issues at stake.
You've been working on the Tactical Sound Garden for a few years.

How did the project start and evolve?
The [TSG] Toolkit began in 2004 as a conceptual mashup of sorts. The idea of participatory sonic environments was something dotsperinch touched on with Sonicmemorial.

org, which launched in 2002. Following that we were working with location-aware technologies on projects such as , which explored the affects of contemporary location tracking technologies on social interaction. In the spring of 2004, I had just finished a proposal with for the Maya Lin Plaza at the University of California at Irvine.

Maya Lin's plan for the plaza involved elaborate landscaping combined with various sculptural elements, lighting treatments, and public benches that had audio speakers embedded within them, for example. We were invited to propose a set of scenarios that would augment her plan with a layer of embedded technologies. The idea of "planting sounds" came directly from this proposal.

Early on, I got in touch with who was working on a project called " " that used 802.11 (WiFi) wireless access points to calculate the location of a mobile device in physical space. Marc pointed me to , an open source API developed by Intel Research in Seattle that aspired to much of Where-Fi's design goals (and had a funded development team!

). From there, the technology development involved hacking together an application that fed the positioning information from Placelab to a in order to output a realtime audio mix based on the geographic location of the participant in physical space.
The current interaction model evolved through low-tech studies using handheld transistor radios with small logbooks attached. From these early studies we were able to get a rough idea of how people were inclined (or not) to interact through placing sounds in a "public" space, and some of the parameters that influenced that interaction. While the project draws on the metaphor of actual urban community gardens, virtual sound gardens don't need to be constrained by the same parameters.

For example, physical community gardens are often structured around the idea of the "plot", where urban public space is spatially partitioned for private cultivation by designated members of a specific community. Given the immateriality of the TSG, and its open participation model, spatial partitioning is one of many possible parameters by which a TSG may be structured. These parameters are being explored through the creation of a series of sound gardens in collaboration with local communities.