Noise Sensitivities: Inviting & Questioning Noise

“For Love and Science” Class at SFPC

2023

I took SFPC’s For Love and Science Class in Winter 2023, and this project was the result. It’s still a work in progress.

“‘For Love and Science: Reclaiming Science through ancestral and intuitive practices’ was a tender exploration of experimentation and research. We learned about matter, energy and information outside the classical western worldview. We explored fundamentals of motion, electricity, astronomy, nuclear energy and quantum physics through an embodied and intuitive lens. Together, we created new tools for research and experimentation, collected and analyzed data through movement, meditation, and improvisation.”

Read a detailed post about the projects on SFPC's site here.

One question I’ve been thinking about: How do we develop sensitivities to different aspects of our world?

I never thought about birds much before started playing a physical and digital board game called Wingspan. Now, when I’m outside, I notice the songs and sounds of different kinds of birds. I listen more deeply and notice more. I started relating this back to different forms of sound and noise: how bird songs are muted by the sound of cars driving by, or the sound of the rain that feels incongruous with happy chirps. As a design researcher who works in technology, I thought about the type of data that’s considered “noise” in a dataset, and the types of of information I’m more sensitized to the more time I spend learning and listening to people or phenomena.

I turned this into an interactive, reflective art project for the class. It’s still a work in progress, so I invite you to follow along via the link below.

Invite and question noise.