Location:Sensation

I've been thinking about locations in space and time and the sensations of them that our "four" senses bring in.

For this project I will note LOCATIONS that I find myself at (Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, Time) and then make MEASUREMENTS and RECORDINGS of the SENSATIONS at those locations.

The measurements, as described in the post above, will be:
Ambient Light
Ambient Sound
Ambient Wind
Ambient Temperature
Ambient Air Chemical Composition

The recordings at these locations will be:
A Photograph
A Sound Recording

It is interesting to note that for the distal senses: Vision and Audition, we do have Cameras and Ink on Paper or Projectors; and Microphones, Recorder/Players, and Speakers. There are no easy equivalents for the other senses. We frequently make things that have tactile qualities or smells or tastes but there are no easy Recorder/Players here.

For sight and sound, the same device that records your child can also record clouds and wind or abstract experiences. There is no easy recorder/player for the smell of mom's apple pie or the texture of sharkskin or satin.

So, for the 2 sensory modalities that we have easy recorder/players for I will make recordings. But what I won't do is what camera and sound people have always done, or what their technology has done automatically for them - I won't adjust the recording device's sensitivity.

All photographs will be exposed at:
ISO-200, f4, 1/50th/second, F=27mm (35mm equivalent)

All sounds will be recorded at:
0 dB-VU = 100 dBc SPL (for a 1kHz tone)

So the images will be recorded at about 6 stops below "bright sunlight" and the sounds will be recorded at about 20dB below the threshold of pain. This means that daylight images may be "blown out" and indoor images may be "lost in the mud." Loud sounds will clip and quiet spaces (there aren't any in SoCal) will be buried in the noise.

Since we normally adjust our recording equipment for ambient levels and since our senses so effortlessly adjust to the staggeringly wide dynamic ranges of ambient conditions this means that in human experience it is rare to actually be aware of the different, extraordinarily different, conditions we find ourselves in. These over/under recorded images and sounds will, through their loss of information, provide a sense of the overwhelming dynamic ranges of the information matricies we are constantly, if often unawarely, swimming in.