It is “at once a limited run academic journal, a finite podcast, a sequence of effective audio essays and an archive of philosophical source material for future forms of postproduction art.” That’s how co-producers Mark Amerika, director of the Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance doctoral program at CU-Boulder and PhD candidate Ryan Ruehlen describe Techne_Lab, a project created in the University’s Techne Lab in conjunction with the IAWP program.
Techne_Lab is a collection of multimedia art pieces that explore the practice-based research methodologies of IAWP students and faculty through the use of audio art. Visitors can listen to episodes featuring IAWP faculty members discussing research topics and personal interests—intermixed with music and sound effects.
Here’s what Amerika and Ruehlen have to say about their work on the project.
Ryan Ruehlen: “The reason we chose to focus on a sound project is because sound enters the body in a different manner than images or written words do. In my research, I'm investigating how sound strikes other aspects of memory and personal experience in ways that are more intuitive than looking at words on a page or screen. A question we're asking is, "How can we create an informational listening experience?" One way we explore this in the Techne_Lab is by experimenting with layers of nuance that we attribute to the voice as a way to pull the listener in. One particular area we're focusing on is the relationship between affect, voice and the thought process itself. It's very interesting to see how the artist's voice, or a cluster of artist voices, can be remixed with other data, other sounds, so that the listening audience feels connected with the various projects and philosophies the faculty and students are developing as part of their creative research.
Using non-vocal sound, and often non-musical sound, the issues articulated by the various participants in the podcast are extended and illuminated more directly—each episode is a unique composition that operates in its own atmospheric context and this, we hope, subtly reveals the nature of our investigations into practice-based research .”
Mark Amerika: “Artists often have a different way of communicating their research methods. In this case, we thought it would be a good idea to document the thoughts and voices of the founding faculty of IAWP just as we were literally starting the new PhD program in practice-based research. To this end, we decided to interview the faculty about the way they think through their creative process and then sample source material from those recorded interviews to convey yet another experiential dimension that points to the kind of intermedia collaborations we hope to curate as we move ahead.”
We decided on the podcast format because it's easy to access and is something that most people can relate to, more than a traditional academic research journal. But each episode is also a work of audio art that identifies with the history of sound as an artistic medium.”
The podcasts can be found on Techne_Lab’s website.