Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Interactive installation Swar from Dhvani project at Gallery Charlot, ISEA2023 Paris

UK-based imprint and publisher Touch celebrates forty years of activity with a specially conceived concert that features longtime collaborators as well as artists that consistently expand the experimental music’s sonic terrain.

Dhvāni, meaning resonance in Sanskrit, is a responsive and self-regulating sound installation. It draws on an Indian epistemology-informed approach to sound and transcendental listening. The project examines the role of the “self” against the Western art object-based tradition. Departing from the object, the project aims to create “auditory situations” where the selfhood and subjectivity of the listener can become part of the artistic production and consequently the work. In doing so, the project develops an understanding of the role of chance and contingency in sound experience as a mode of creating temporal disjuncture for the “divine intervention” as Indian musician Gita Sarabhai informed John Cage in 1946 helping to shape Cage’s subsequent work with chance composition.

Dhvāni is an interactive sound installation made up of a network of 51 suspended and interconnected Indian temple bells under which you are invited to stroll. Integrating current research in acoustics and artificial intelligence, the project aims to create evolving “hearing situations”. When a bell is set in motion, the entire network begins to vibrate to give birth to a real sound ballet, all orchestrated by an artificial intelligence developed by the project team. Dhvāni's bells then become the keyboard of a new musical instrument.

Expanded Object responds to a crucial question: whether “sound” can be “exhibited” as an artistic object and whether exhibiting sound works is problematic considering the nature and characteristics of sound predominantly emerging as an invisible and immaterial phenomenon spilling over any artistic object framed within an exhibition setting. By mounting interactive canvasses as sound producing objects, the project aims to suggest the relational nature of sound art.

Le Souffleur is an urban acoustic intervention that aims to reactivate the Ain El Mreisseh Stairs as a public space in the city. The project is inspired from Ibrahim Najem's story, the fisherman who yearned to bring the stories of the sea to Ras Beirut by collecting throughout the years submarine wreckage and sea marvels and showing them in his house.

Machine Poetry is a sound installation that searches for poetic openings in the machine-induced sound-world and advocates for poetic contemplation involving pre-cognitive association, impromptu flashes, and explosions of memory, sensitivity and perceptiveness of an altered and subjective reality as the crucial parameters for augmented intelligence. As scholars have argued, there is a stronger link between human perception of sound, and imagination and contemplation, making any sonic experience more private, intimate, and subjective than other sense modalities. Using humanly spoken words within a site-responsive and generative sound environment at the methodological core of the work, the argument for a deep necessity of a poetic rupture in the contemporary human condition is provided an entry-point, developed, and substantiated in this participatory and discursive installation.

Towards an Amicable End is a re-generative work involving archival field recordings of primary climate variables like water, wind and woods, and environmental phenomena that are captured using custom-built radio receivers, weaved together by double bass and electronics.

Decomposing Landscape creates a discursive situation instead of a traditionally immersive experience in media art, in order to facilitate an in-depth and contemplative observation of such transitive landscapes for affective engagement and public action. With a media anthropological approach, the project frames the slow decay of these sites with the help of digital convergence, staging augmented environments for site-specific interpenetration between sound, and moving images.

The work responds to the current indisposition of migration, placelessness, and nomadism – impulses of a contemporary condition that eventually blurs the boundaries between the digital and the corporeal, between local and the global, between private and public domains, or between intimate and dehumanizing spaces, helping the nomadic subject to emerge as an elevated, emancipated self. The project intends to examine these contemporary realities manifesting in a post-immersive interactive installation incorporating multi-channel sound diffusion and modulated text as live visualization of field recordings to create a discursive situation.

The audiovisual installation Resonating Field from the ongoing project Decomposing Landscape, exhibited at Quartair Contemporary Art Initiatives Den Haag, creates a discursive situation for critical as well as affective engagement with these environmentally and ecologically troubled sites. The work has been developed through a meticulous collection of materials from various environmentally affected sites in extensive fieldworks supported by Prince Claus Fund. By exhibiting on-going work, the project intends to sensitize the wider public consciousness about the devastating consequences of a profit-oriented development model for the humans and their habitual environments.

Exile and Other Syndromes, exhibited at the Screen City Biennale 2017, responds to the current indisposition of migration, placelessness, and nomadism – impulses of a contemporary condition that eventually blurs the boundaries between the digital and the corporeal, between local and the global, between private and public domains, or between intimate and dehumanizing spaces, helping the nomadic subject to emerge as an elevated, emancipated self. The project intends to examine these contemporary realities manifesting in a post-immersive interactive installation incorporating multi-channel sound diffusion and modulated text as live visualization of field recordings to create a discursive situation. The work considers mindful aspects of deterritorialized listening and explores its introspective capacity transcending the barrier of immediate meaning to touch the poetic sensibilities. The particular emphasis on the poetic attributes of listening provides a context to explore the unexpected splendour of everyday sounds and their transcendental potential.

Arithmetic of Distance is a series of multichannel compositions, first performed at the Helicotrema Festival 2016. The raw materials of the work are the field recordings made during my stays in various parts of Europe, namely Florence, Aarhus, Berlin, Copenhagen, Graz, Brussels, London (which is Europe no more) and so forth. The idea behind the series is the simultaneously engaged and disengaged situations within which I, over these years, have come to explore Europe as a great psychogeographic terrain rather than a fractured landscape with a disintegrating conscience.