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Shown during the last edition of the Cube Festival at Issy-Les-Moulineaux inJune, the planetary topographical listening performance offered by thecomposer and German multimedia artist Jens Brand was one of the mostsensitive experience to live during the big digital get together of theHauts de Seines.

Planetary scale

Called We Play The World, andcleverly sub-titled The Earth Is A Disc, the project offers totranspose the technical and sensible principle of disc listening to theplanetary scale that becomes itself the listening material, or moreprecisely the listening surface. Using an iPod diverted from itsfunction and called G-Pod or G-Player, and a three-dimensional Earth’ssurface, Jens Brand thus carries out a real sound accentuation of theimaginary groove that would trace a celestial body on the Earth’ssurface.

In concrete terms, the G-Player invented by Jens Brand is able todetermine in real time the position of more than a thousand satelliteslisted orbiting the Earth. Once one of them is selected, he catches itsgeographical information (orbital altitude, latitude, longitude) andthen transforms these data in what could be interpreted as the virtualequivalent of the tonearm of a record-player (or the optical reader ofa CD player). From then on, the satellite finds itself diverted fromits initial function as well to come and groove the earth’s crust asthe sapphire needle would do on a vinyl for example. By combining thesetwo types of data, the dynamic ones given by the satellite, and thetopographic ones given by the different reads of the earth surface, weobtain surprising auditory interpretations, reusable and displayabledistantly via the G-Player.

Morphological element

In this scripted sound context of earth skin and in this new originalform of art environment, every morphological element, every sedimentarycurve takes the shape of musical instruments or divergent soundsources. The seas echo deadly silence layers. Mountains develop rawersound shapes, more dynamic, full of granular asperities dug by thevalleys depressions, while the plains relay more stuffy and minimalisttracks

It’s a scientific TV show that gave the idea of the project to JensBrand: It was about scanning and representing solar eruptions. You haveto know that it is only possible thanks to the hole in the ozone layerand I said to myself that it was fascinating that such a scientificpossibility was actually possible thanks to an environmental disaster!This ambiguity fascinated me and I said to myself that it would beinteresting to build the biggest CD player in the world thanks to thesedata, by simply linking the polar laser to a standard CD player inorder to translate those solar eruptions into music. In this sense, theuniverse was the disc and the planet would have been the player. It wasas well a way to make a sound experience and at the same time to mockthis outdated concept that still puts the Earth in the center of theuniverse. Of course, people at the institute sent me packing. But inthe meantime, I had done some researches and noticed that this processcould work as well with satellites, which took me to the G-Playerproject.

Charged elements
It is therefore more a private interest for a scientific object betweenfascination, irony and consternation, than a metaphoric quest that isat the origin of the project. And here again the choice of the iPod asa pilot was not neutral: the iPod is an icon. We always think about theApple slogan, Think different! And it perfectly fitted my deviationintentions. It’s for this reason as well that I placed the object in anIkea furniture, leaving the price tag!

It is impossible to follow the project peregrinations by connecting onthe website of Jens Brand, g-turns.com. We discover the project veryfirst steps, from the “player” GP4 to its mobile model, and so morepractical, of the actual G-Pod. In addition, we can order tools andsoftware necessary for a domestic use of the process: the driver G-One(Global Orbit Navigation Engine) allowing to track on the internet eachof the satellites and to go from one to the other to scratch in realtime on the planet, or the Beeliner, a software allowing to createdirect sound connections between two places arbitrarily chosen on theEarth surface. We thus choose a starting point and a destination pointon a map, and we then let ourselves be guided by the edifying soundtrip that is about to happen.

Every day on this website, a pilot satellite is selected, the way it’sgoing to take and its positioning characteristics are revealed, areading interface allowing to access in real time the soundinterpretation of its interferences under the form of this famous“toposound” statement. It is as well possible to access via podcast therecordings of the spiciest satelittary tracks. As to the future of theproject, Jens Brandt is already working on it: we are currentlythinking about some adaptation modalities of the concept, to the iPonefor example or other media. Nothing sure yet… Therefore a project to befollowed… in the sky as well as on the Earth.

Laurent Catala

Website: www.g-turns.com

 
From: MCD 49

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