In her work “Stack Overflow”, Barbara Herold translates data processing into an acoustic-visual augmented reality experience in urban space. For the media artist, places are compositions that can be experienced through the senses. In the AR installation “Stack Overflow”, the Forum at Münchner Freiheit is expanded and recomposed with virtual elements. The site is acoustically and architecturally fragmented, sorted and layered in a continuous loop.
“Stack Overflow” transforms the Brutalist architecture of the Forum into tumbling sound sculptures and piling stacks. Visitors start directly in the impact zone; they can modify and generate the sound sets, as well as the order and speed of the stacks, by their position, distance and direction from the sculpture. Up close, the stacking appears to be a rapid, abrupt, uncontrolled, continuous bombardment. From a distance, the falling, collision and stacking of the elements becomes a contemplative pleasure. Each element in the stack is individual: in form, texture, associated sounds and simulative physical properties.
Sound designer Kim Ramona Ranalter (Kim_Twiddle) creates the soundscape for “Stack Overflow”. She extracts the sound material from field recordings from Münchner Freiheit and arranges it into short individual samples. Clashing cuts, humming surfaces and singing melodies are combined in the AR programming to create controlled randomised sound compositions.
At the opening of “Stack Overflow”, Kim_Twiddle further processes these compositions in a live act. The installation is also accompanied by guided tours with the artist Barbara Herold in July 2019.
Barbara Herold, born in 1977 in Munich, lives and works in Munich.
