Inside Yellow Sound

The left of the painting is a blue purple colour and towards the right it is yellow. In the centre red is prominent, in the shape of a cross. These three background colours all melt together so there are no edges. A variety of squares, circles, triangles and abstract shapes are dotted around and overlapped. There are also straight and curved black lines that go through the colours and shapes.

CEO and Artistic Director Maria Oshodi is currently collaborating with Dr Maria Kapsali, Lecturer in Physical Performance at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds, and her colleagues Dr Nikos Stavropoulos, a composer of acousmatic and mixed music, and experimental music technologist, Kingsley Ash.

Inside Yellow Sound is an immersive environment that will explore the development of synesthetic experience for sighted, partially sighted and blind audience members, through the development of movement sonification technology, in relation to the play Yellow Sound (1909) written by painter Wassily Kandinsky. Yellow Sound is an interdisciplinary work of art that emerged from Kandinsky’s desire to synthesise different art forms into coherent ‘total’ artworks. An exploration of the play today through movement sonification allows us to revisit the notion of total art in relation to the needs of contemporary audiences and the potential of immersive environments.

The project aims to reconfigure the relationship between the play and the audience members, and specifically explore how the use of a movement sonification system may extend the audience members’ kinetic repertoire within the installation space. Inside Yellow Sound will turn the visitors’ movement into the main vehicle that brings the visual and sonic aspects of the play into being. It aims to explore how a responsive technology can position audience members as agents within the performative environment. The project will ask questions about cultural understandings of synaesthesia and its potential to engage blind or partially sighted people (BPSP), who are often excluded from visually centred artworks, and/or their participation is positioned in terms of substituting one sense with another (through for example audio description of live or recorded performance). The project is also appropriate for mainstream audiences as it focuses on the expansion of embodied experience, as a key way for engaging with art.

The team will be exploring together during several workshop sessions in September and presenting a sharing event in Leeds to an invited audience in early November.

If you would like to find out more about the sharing, please get in touch at [email protected].