Contained: Haunted Aural Architectures in Virtual Reality

Contained is a virtual reality (VR) project that stages anthropocentric spaces as haunted acoustic architectures, non-places permeated with the sonic spectres of unseen forces. The work seeks to invert the traditional, visually-biased audio-visual hierarchy via a positioning of spatial and haptic audio as the central elements within an immersive cinematic experience, emphasizing sound’s ability to not only permeate space and surround the auditor as an affective atmosphere, but also its capacity to penetrate, saturate and vibrate a listening body, forming an intense relational bond between self and environment, whether material or virtual.

This project evolves from and roots itself within an acoustemological approach: acoustemology is best described by Steven Feld as engaging “sound as a way of knowing” (Feld 2015, 12)). Contained explores how concepts rooted in the discipline might bear an impact not only on how immersive audiovisual experiences are created, but also on how they might enable a unique, profoundly embodied encounter.

Thematically, this project presents an auscultation of our anthropocentric milieu, integrating field recordings, 360º camera footage and 3D scans of urban corporate towers, logistical networks, industrial areas and other non-places (Augé 1995) as well as urban encampments and derelict locales that are resonant with both the heard and unheard acoustic emanations of the technotope we have become dependent upon for our survival. In doing so, it approaches sound as a material that can be apprehended as both corporeal and abstracted: in addition to the airborne, audible sound of the subject spaces, Contained integrates the electrical, vibrational and mnemonic emissions that permeate our everyday habitats, highlighting their roles as unheeded yet nonetheless deeply affective components of a quotidian and contingent soundscape.