Pleinair TV (2025)
kris × weather citizen × otodojo
Circle Forest, Detroit
This interactive ambisonic audio player presents an excerpted render of weather citizen's hybrid performance/installation for Pleinair TV.
To use, simply click LISTEN and drag cursor around the screen to dynamically move listening orientation. The audio will render in real time based on these movements.
For best results, listen on headphones via Brave, Firefox, or Chrome browsers (Safari does not support ambisonic audio).
Binaural rendering by Omnitone (Google, Apache-2.0), using HRIRs from the SADIE database (University of York). Player and interface by weather citizen.
PLEINAIR TV, taking inspiration from the french practice of painting “in the open air”, was a hybrid public exhibition of practice, performance, and installation, curated by Kris McKinney at Circle Forest in Detroit, in collaboration with weather citizen and otodojo.
After the work of Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and harmolodics, as well as Bernie Krause's notion of the great animal orchestra, the event was an exploration of the complicated reintegration of the electronic back into biological ecosystems.
Centered in a clearing in the arboretum, a custom-built 3x3 wall of CRTV monitors, with a projection screen on its opposite face, transmitted the fixed media and live-synthesized images from kris.
Around the perimeter, the sound system consisted of 4 surround nearfield monitors, 4 elevated nearfield monitors, and a subwoofer, from the Neighborhood Art School's Fieldspeaker system. The surround and elevated monitors were arranged, respectively, in offset quadrophonic orientation.
Otodojo and weather citizen performed their work individually on laptops with controllers, connected to a MOTU 16A.
weather citizen's presentation coincided with the setting of the sun, combining generative and performed synthesis and sampling in an exercise of introducing synthetic geophony and biophony representationally. Electromagnetic ‘recordings’ of the sun, processed and layered, were spatialized to follow the trajectory of the sun, while generative sampled and synthetic elements sketched the surrounding biological life. As visitors arrived, anthrophony was also introduced, the arc of the work being orchestrated in live performance, interacting with the ecology of the video wall, arboretum, and visitors.
