Visiting Narrators

Visiting Narrators is a 15-minute audio composition that collages six different voices together along with audio clips from my home life. These voices represent friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and students. They were recorded in the Athenaeum Media Den in Newman Library at Virginia Tech during individual interviews on the topics of daydreaming, our relationship to daydreaming, and the spaces where we daydream. Participants were selected, in part, because they had previously and organically shared a unique outlook on daydreaming and spaces. During the recordings, each person shared memories of spaces they went to daydream, why they went, and what they got out of visiting those spaces. In the collage of their different voices and unique memories, they helped construct many of the experiences that I too resonated with while thinking about, and discussing, spaces for daydreams.

In addition to the audio composition, I created a visualization of their voices to bring to life a will-o-the-wisp, which was used in two other artworks: Prelude and Projected Presence. In the animated visualization, I used the peaks and valleys in the recordings as the high points and low points on a 3D glowing sphere by converting the audio waveform into a displacement map. This process provided the wisp with a human touch that is hard to achieve through digital animation alone.