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Andrew DemirjianFollow

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Conference Talk - Individual

Abstract

This Conference Talk will discuss the collaborative methodologies, technical challenges and aesthetic concepts behind the making of a new language-centered audio Augmented Reality (AR) project on the Rutgers University Newark campus. The artwork commemorates the Black Organization of Students (BOS) activism in the late-nineteen sixties that reshaped public higher education in New Jersey through challenging exclusionary university policies. Drawing from hundreds of hours of archival audio interviews, the piece creates a sonic monument that activates the architecture of the campus with the language of BOS members, their goals, aspirations and strategies to pressure the administration for change.

The collaboratively created artwork was an interdisciplinary initiative that brought together students from graduate and undergraduate disciplines to work with the artist to develop a new public sound work for the campus. Collectively the group analyzed the language in the audio recordings from Rutgers-Newark Oral History Collection, and developed approaches to parsing and juxtaposing viewpoints. The Conference Talk reveals the aesthetic approaches to organizing and presenting the vast archive in a meaningful way, and discusses spatializing the audio across the campus by different thematic content. A unique feature of the artwork is the playing and re-recording of the selected excerpts from the BOS interviews into the architecture of the campus and mapping the new recording to GPS coordinates so the listener can hear the BOS voices reverberating off the location where they are standing. The custom designed audio AR app allows students, faculty and visitors the ability to navigate across the campus with the language seamlessly changing from location to location as they learn more details and nuances about the challenges and inspiration for BOS members.

In addition to sonic excerpts and video documentation of the production process, the presentation will also examine archival news footage and photographs of the takeover as well as an analysis of the language of protest signs to provide context for the work. In addition, the presentation will chart my efforts to apply co-creation methods learned in MIT’s Open Doc Lab, where I am a Fellow, and provide useful recommendations for co-creative approaches. Rutgers University Newark is currently one of the most diverse campuses in the United States and the collective actions undertaken by BOS had a significant role in fostering this change. The piece aims to find a new way to make the significance of the contributions of the BOS resonate to a new generation, to make the absent voices from the past who have shaped their surroundings heard.

Bio

Andrew Demirjian is an interdisciplinary artist who works with remix, rhythm and ritual. He creates environments for critical reflection through scraping and recombining popular culture, making intricate collages of sound and language. His work is often presented in non-traditional exhibition spaces and takes the form of interactive installations, generative art, multi-channel videos and live performances.

He is currently a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where he is working on a computational text analysis project for linguistic remixing of vast quantities of video files. Andrew’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, Eyebeam, Fridman Gallery, Rush Arts, the White Box gallery, Cyberfest, Fieldgate Gallery, the Center for Book Arts, The Newark Museum and many other galleries, festivals and museums. He is the author of Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem, a book of poetry and collection of music that remixes the lyrics and songs of 195 national anthems. The MacDowell Colony, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks, Diapason, The Experimental Television Center, The Bemis Center, LMCC Swing Space, The Visual Studies Workshop and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts are among some of the organizations that have supported his work. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department and the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College.

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Listening to Change: Activism, Archives and Audio Augmented Reality

This Conference Talk will discuss the collaborative methodologies, technical challenges and aesthetic concepts behind the making of a new language-centered audio Augmented Reality (AR) project on the Rutgers University Newark campus. The artwork commemorates the Black Organization of Students (BOS) activism in the late-nineteen sixties that reshaped public higher education in New Jersey through challenging exclusionary university policies. Drawing from hundreds of hours of archival audio interviews, the piece creates a sonic monument that activates the architecture of the campus with the language of BOS members, their goals, aspirations and strategies to pressure the administration for change.

The collaboratively created artwork was an interdisciplinary initiative that brought together students from graduate and undergraduate disciplines to work with the artist to develop a new public sound work for the campus. Collectively the group analyzed the language in the audio recordings from Rutgers-Newark Oral History Collection, and developed approaches to parsing and juxtaposing viewpoints. The Conference Talk reveals the aesthetic approaches to organizing and presenting the vast archive in a meaningful way, and discusses spatializing the audio across the campus by different thematic content. A unique feature of the artwork is the playing and re-recording of the selected excerpts from the BOS interviews into the architecture of the campus and mapping the new recording to GPS coordinates so the listener can hear the BOS voices reverberating off the location where they are standing. The custom designed audio AR app allows students, faculty and visitors the ability to navigate across the campus with the language seamlessly changing from location to location as they learn more details and nuances about the challenges and inspiration for BOS members.

In addition to sonic excerpts and video documentation of the production process, the presentation will also examine archival news footage and photographs of the takeover as well as an analysis of the language of protest signs to provide context for the work. In addition, the presentation will chart my efforts to apply co-creation methods learned in MIT’s Open Doc Lab, where I am a Fellow, and provide useful recommendations for co-creative approaches. Rutgers University Newark is currently one of the most diverse campuses in the United States and the collective actions undertaken by BOS had a significant role in fostering this change. The piece aims to find a new way to make the significance of the contributions of the BOS resonate to a new generation, to make the absent voices from the past who have shaped their surroundings heard.