Please join us in celebrating the opening of the latest instalment of Audio Foundation 2018 Gallery Programme.

In this show, four artists from around Aotearoa take three different approaches in considering how sound might be applied, experimented with and experienced in virtual space.

In SoundLab VR, DOTDOT utilise full VR to playfully explore sound and musical creativity. The user begins by pulling down a custom designed virtual reality headset, entering a series of spaces in which they are able to engage with sound in a different way. Clapping allows the user to move from one experimental scene to the next, from spaces where sounds are like plants that need watering to play, to others where they are able to pin them to objects in space. Finally the user is invited to create sounds with a pinch of their fingers, arranging composition around themselves in virtual, three dimensional space.

In Paul Timings’ latest “middle-class game”, HEADMODE, viewers/players are tasked variously with improving street survival skills, making bitcoins rain on plebs, and preserving their precious genes. Contributions to this humorous critique of a middling middle-class’s absurd priorities have been made by various other artists as well as a tax lawyer.

In Untitled (Jan 2), Chris Wratt and Sam Longmore model the reflections and reverberations of real-world space in a radically reduced, virtual environment, sparsely populated with strange, at times impossible, structures. Wratt’s custom designed algorithm offers game-designers the chance to more accurately reproduce the properties of built-space in virtual settings, while the foregrounding of the oftentimes overlooked influence of acoustic reflection on spatial experiences marks a continuation of Longmore’s earlier explorations of its effect.

Opens – Thursday 8 March, 5.30pm (w. refreshments from Liberty Breweries)
Hours – Tuesday – Saturday, 12.00pm – 4.00pm.
Closes – Saturday 7 April 4.00pm.