Connected Dots Studio

FINALIST

‘Afternoon Performance of the Centennial Park Fruit Bats’

The pockets of nature in Sydney and its urban architecture can feel disjointed, but they share a situatedness in space and time. While Gallery 12 is sometimes empty as the sun sets, the co-temporal experience of the calls and flapping of fruit bats in Centennial Park can be heard. Imagining the places as one through a merging of sound and space allows a cohesiveness of place and context to manifest. The weft and the warp, sound and vision, space and time, technology and craft, external nature and interior space meet, as a spiritual access point, facilitated by the creative act. The balance between these and other dichotomous forces through the act of creation allows everything to coexist simultaneously at the site of creation - the tapestry.

 A parametric simulation was created, which resulted in the tapestry design, using an open-source recording of fruit bats in Centennial Park (taken from the Timber Festival's sounds of the forest sound map and recorded by Jon Panther). As SITE 3: Top Floor Gallery provides the most optimal site for fruit bats to naturally occupy due to its height and unique ceiling, a model of it was used with the recording. The recording and its projected acoustic response in Gallery 12 were utilised to construct the pattern for weaving. As the sound travels through the gallery and resonates on the ceiling and floor, the spatially altered sound waves affect the points on the wall where the tapestry would hang. The tapestry serves as a visual archive of the performance of the sound in the space, modifying experiential acoustic conditions through its physical presence while also highlighting them through its process of creation. The sounds of Sydney's fruit bats (and their effects in space) are given tangible materiality and a human interpretation of the performance as the tapestry is woven.

Connected Dots Studio is an art and architecture studio based in Stockholm, Sweden, established by Sebastian Gatz and Nicole Miller. Sebastian holds an M.A. in architecture from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, in 2017. Nicole is a visual anthropologist and artist, specialising in sculpture and ceramics, which establish a social situatedness as foundational for creation. Their work ranges from theoretical writing to everyday artistic creations to the designing and construction of physical buildings.