We were asked by the London-based 20//20 Collective to contribute a piece for their day at Boxpark, Shoreditch, with the brief of simply highlighting “what is important to protect in the changing landscape of Shoreditch and its environs.”

Together with a very talented sound artist and composer, Soosan Lolavar, we decided to use a map to feature sights and sounds from the area directly surrounding Boxpark.

Due to quite a tight deadline to create the installation, we had to think creatively to achieve a result that both fulfilled the brief and was interesting to play with. Soosan took to the streets and began collecting photos and sound clips from the areas we wanted to feature, and came back with video and audio for around twenty points surrounding Boxpark. Meanwhile I set about creating a interactive map for Soosan to drop her images and audio into.

We wanted the installation to be interactive, making it more of an exploratory experience for the visitors, so we would allow people to hover over certain areas of the map but decided to group the points into four clusters to make the interaction easier.

Again, due to the short timeline, we needed to work with technology that was suited to quick production times. The tech-stack I settled on was Pure Data for the audio components, Quartz Composer for the visuals, those two communicating via OSC, and an Apple Magic Trackpad for user input. I went with Quartz as it has an easily debuggable graphical interface for creating patches, it’s very suited to interactive work with lots of built in objects intended for user input, and it has a lot of pre-made patches with great looking visual effects.

As expected, the Pure Data patch only needed to be very simple, with all of the audio files on constant loop, with OSC information coming from Quartz for which group of sound samples to fade up. In turn, Pure Data would randomly choose one photo from the cluster and send this info back to Quartz so that the correct photo could be displayed.