What does it mean to experience a ‘level’ in the physical realm with a life-soundtrack? What does it mean to be ‘partnered’? Is there a sense of postdiction or prediction, deja vu even, when one sense is controlled by external forces while another is left untethered for exploration?

Do you hear what I hear? The answer is almost always no. This piece centers on the use of two pairs of wireless headphones for a ‘couple’ (even if just for this experience) to utilize. Through this coupled, invisible connection, a simultaneous auditory experience is provided. The synced, curated experience is then coupled with a visual and tactile experience within a ‘magic circle,’ a unique temporal and spatial location birthed and bounded by play.

=== SPOILER === materials & process === SPOILER ===

While the space is staged to resemble an abandoned living room or attic space, all the items are from my home, my life. Items include a sitting area with sofa and table from my sewing room, an antique steamer trunk hung with large photographic prints, slides, and other photography and archival materials rather than haberdashery, a lightbox, a Japanese tea box and set, and one of my small electronic sculptures (a blinking eye in a magnifier). All of these items return to my living space after the installation has completed its exhibit, returning to use in my hands, absorbing stories, holding tales, and making timelines.

I make video games as art as well, and so for me this was a live action level to be designed for non-linear play and artificial bounds enforced by player agency. As such, it was important to capture and exude the essence of this lived mystery for the participants to engage with of their own volition, without any promise of interaction. I enjoy storytelling through visuals and through the offer of engagement, but also audioscapes.

This piece relies heavily on audioscapes, as it is through the mechanism of a shared soundtrack that I couple the participants in this experience. My David Gates is a musician and created the music tracks for the experience which were interspersed with vocal recordings which I crafted. Coupling/connection through sound is a very powerful mechanism, particularly as I am using it to set the tone and theme of the explorative experience — consider those interesting experiments where people are assigned a scene from a movie and must pair it with sounds/audio to set a mood. Every watched experience is different due to the auditory accompaniment and thus each person told their own unique story through the pairing selection. In this case, the audio is set, but the exploration is up to the participants.