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Smartphones Become a Swarming Orchestra in This Sound Art Experience

Sound artist Atticus J. Bastow harnesses apps, sounds, smartphones, and his own audience for his upcoming piece, 'Swarm & Murmuration.'
Swarm & Murmuration at the 2013 Liquid Architecture festival in Melbourne. Photos by Kristoffer Paulsen. Image via

Audience members become a collective swarm in Swarm & Murmuration, a participatory work by sound artist Atticus J. Bastow that explores the nature of performance through spontaneous, collective sound composition. Equipped with a tone-generating app installed on their own smartphones, participants move around at will, listening, following, and negotiating each other. Using the app, participants can switch notes, altering their individual micro-melodies and re-balancing the overall “swarm” composition by changing their relative positions. The movement of the phones and the constantly changing relationship of the participants to each other creates undulating shifts in the pitch of the “cloud,” resulting in a buzzing, soaring sonic entity.

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Earlier performances of Swarm & Murmuration have been staged using performers rather than uninitiated audience participants. At the Museum of Old and New Art's upcoming summer festival, MOFO ’15, however, Bastow will be taking the work to the next level when he orchestrates the first, full-blown participatory iteration of the project. The Creators Project sat down with Bastow to talk about using smartphones as instruments, the archetype of the sound artist, and the perks of performing outside of the box.

The Creators Project: How did you develop Swarm & Murmuration?

Atticus J. Bastow: I was messing around one day, playing with tone generators on my phone, and heard the Doppler shift of moving the phone modulating the sound. The first version from that work was for the 2013 Liquid Architecture festival in Sydney. It involved 35 people and was more of a set performance—all the performers had been instructed what to do. Afterward I thought about developing the piece into a more participatory work, which had kind of been the original concept.

MOFO ’15 will be the first time you present the piece as a full-blown participatory work. What are you expecting?

Yeah, this will be the first time, so there’ll be a really big element of experiment to the work, which is great. Who knows how many people will turn up, how they will fill the space and move around, and what tones they will choose to play?

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You’ve orchestrated other works that rely, to varying degrees, on audience participation. What is it that interests you about interactive, or participatory works?

I really like participation as a performance methodology—it’s inclusive and all-engaging. I hate to use the word “deconstruction” because it sounds so "art school"—even though I am "art school"—but I like the deconstruction of the traditional performance that it brings. It’s a nice way to break down the uni-directional nature of performance where I’m stuck behind a laptop screen wearing a black shirt.

To what extent is Swarm a comment on our dependence on mobile phones?

Fundamentally, Swarm is really about the experience or nature of performance in that you, as an audience member, are engaged with your whole body, not just standing there listening passively.

Using phones was mainly just a way of amassing a large number of sonic activators or sound makers, even while maybe getting people to re-evaluate the way they look at their phones. That’s a small part of it though and second hand — that instead of just being communication devices, phones can be instruments too.

On that point, how do you think smart phones are changing the way we create and use sound?

They’re having quite a lot of impact, but are still an emerging tool in creation or performance. They’re not the norm yet—people are still surprised that a lot of the sounds I generate are through smart phones.

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People have been working with portable media devices for almost ten years now in different performative applications. I’ve used a number of different apps to generate material for works and performances before—there are actually so many different apps and methods out there that there can be a bit of option paralysis.

You’re talking in an artistic sense—what about in an everyday sense? How are smart phones changing the average person’s relationship to sound?

Bloom is a generative ambient music app that is almost totally intuitive. There’s basically no user interface; you just touch the screen to create different sounds. There are a bunch of different apps out there that are beautifully engaging and encourage you to create soundscapes that you don’t have to be a musician to use. Granted they’re predisposed to being harmonious and to have the flavour of the artist that created the app in the first place, but they’re a really welcome addition to the array of smartphone apps—not too specialized or too niche.

Image via

How important is new and emerging technology to your practice?

I like to work in surround sound to break down the unilateral performance format. In general though, I’ve never considered my practice to be particularly technologically oriented — the use of smart phones is probably as far as its gone so far. Simple, minimal set-ups allow the work to breathe and be. They also allow for slight variations that shape the evolution of the piece, making for a different work each time.

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What’s the next step for you?

I’m sitting on about two albums worth of field recording/sound art material that I’d like to release. And I’ve got a solo exhibition and some group shows on next year. Right now I’m focusing on this Swarm performance for MOFO. Nothing else planned yet.

Atticus will be performing Swarm & Murmuration as part of the MOFO ’15 summer festival from 16-17 January. Entry is included in the festival ticket.

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