[ISEA2019] Artists Statement: Jane Grant, Jay Auborn & Coral Manton – Between Us

Artists Statement

Magic leap, sound and visuals for augmented reality, and subpack, dimensions variable.

Between Us is an Augmented Reality audio/visual artwork about desire, solar physics and the impossibility of touch. Between Us is made for Magic Leap and Sennheiser AMBEO 3D audio.
Drawing on quantum physicist Karen Barad’s work on touch, the narrative in
Between Us is at once seductive and unsettling.
Participants inhabit an audio/visual world where they are addressed directly through the narrative. Immersed in the 3D soundscape and visuals, the participant is both audience and artwork, guided by a disembodied voice that speaks of solar physics and the haunting nature of desire, the anticipative action of touch.
Between Us allows us to sonically and visually inhabit the temporary intimate fusing of the outer edge of our atmosphere as it meets the sun’s radiative action – the ionosphere where the sun and the earth first touch. Our skin is constantly filtering air, reacting to temperature changes, signaling hormonal drives, fears and desires. In likening the ionosphere to the skin of our bodies we may by able to imagine the invisible interactions taking place between things and selves, things and things, and selves and selves. In sonifying this interaction we inhabit where the sun and the earth meet, where the ionosphere draws towards the sun like the pilomotor reflexes of the tiny hairs on our skin. The desirous nature of Between Us evokes the dynamic interplay between two bodies or systems, where we inhabit the in-between, the invisible interactions that take place where attraction and repulsion reside.
Between us is funded by SWCTN and University of Plymouth.
Jane Grant: Artist, Director, Scriptwriter.
Jay Auborn: Sound design, audio production. Coral Manton: Visual Design, Unity Developer
Giorgio Cortiana, Sound Design and Audio Programming. Phil Liford, Sound Design and Audio Programming.
Illustration: Skye Liu Tianzi

  • Jane Grant‘s artworks explore scientific mythologies concepts ranging from neuroscience, black holes and the multiverse. Her artworks engage the phenomenological aspects of these systems in order to create ‘other worlds’. Her work engages directly with the invisible, the unfathomable, the distant and the miniscule, developing site based artworks that allow participants to inhabit these other worlds, often in acts of co-creation. Her artworks focus on the interdisciplinary with special interest in habitation, immersion and non-human phenomenon. Jane sometimes works collaboratively creating award-winning works such as The Fragmented Orchestra, a sonic artwork based on neuronal firing patterns which won the PRSF Award for New Music and a PrixArs award and Plasticity which was premiered at the BFI, onedotzero festival and Google Campus, London. She has exhibited work at the National Portrait Gallery London, The Roundhouse, FACT Liverpool and others.
    More recently, she exhibited Fathom, a huge artwork that immerses participants in an underwater sonic environment and her sonic artwork This Excited Surface sited in camera obscuras.   janegrant.org
  • Jay Auborn & Coral Manton