A collaborative work, collected and created by Margarita Novikova – MA Sound Arts (alumni), London College of Communication In collaboration with UAL Post-Grad Community for the Walls in Online Places, an online exhibition showcase for students to share their work whilst in isolation and practicing social distancing.
Above: a short sample of the immersive work
As a sound artist and artist-filmmaker, I actively play a role within creative communities and collaborative projects focused on oral history and storytelling. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 global lockdown, many projects have been forced to postpone, in some cases cancelled. Due to the travel restrictions and quarantine rules, I have been isolating in Montenegro where I have started working with mosaics, which is a new media for me.
I created a mosaic series titled Seatilesworks which brought me virtually to the Post-Grad Community project Walls in Online Places. It was here that I realised I was not alone and found many others making work in lockdown conditions.
Before the pandemic, group gatherings would bring people together to chat, drink, sing, play, laugh, cry, murmur and listen to each other, creating a natural soundscape to surround them. Now we are together virtually, we can’t predict our new soundscape and reality.
I proposed the idea of filling our new virtual Place with sounds and offered the participants of Walls in Online Placesto collaborate sonically to do so. I asked the artists to share the recordings of their environments and their voices in an attempt to build a “new togetherness”. This resulted in a non-linear participatory sound composition titled Noise In Online Places. The visitor of the project’s website becomes a participant who co-creates the virtual soundscape by activating the sonic samples “placed” in the different “corners” of this virtual “place”.
The sounds are hidden behind the ceramic pebbles, which are from my own Seatileworks works created at the beginning of the lockdown.
Noise in Online Places is not just a soundscape; it is an immersive repository of the artist’s stories. Explore our new world, visit the project website, click on the mosaic buttons, imagine you are with us, together.
Visit the 'Noise in Online Places' project website
Please note that where music can be heard it is an incidental recording of it in the background to another sound being collected and will be deemed as fair usage, and is not intended to be representing anything within the project itself.
Walls in Online Places
Walls in Online Places is an online exhibition programme for UAL postgrads to share their work whilst in isolation and practicing social distancing.
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