Ping Myself With Myself

Digital Cousin of Ping Myself With Myself

Click a photo to play a voice memo that I made to myself while traveling through the Mojave Desert in March 2020.

Project Description

Ping Myself With Myself helps me think through a video that I am in the process of making.  The video, by turn, is a prospectus for a larger art work, an installation tentatively titled Being (in the) Mojave.  This embodied sound project, therefore, is a humble first step in a much longer journey.

Here is the content:

Ping Myself is a two-dimensional paper technology that functions within architectural space, like a studio or a home.  Measuring 18x24 inches, it hangs on a wall(s), and—being both haptic and sonic--responds with audio clips upon touching the paper with a finger or other conductive material.  The audio clips are edited segments of voice memos that I made—essentially me talking to my future self—while traversing the Mojave Desert in March 2020.  (Geographic regions, unlike political territories, are never exactly delineated.  The Mojave is as much an idea and an image as it is a place that one enters and leaves.  Having said that, the rough edges of the Mojave, ecologically speaking, are Los Angeles to the west, Las Vegas to the east, Death Valley to the north, and Joshua Tree to the south.)

Ping Myself is a technology that aids in memory and in synthetic thinking.  I am fascinated with synthesis as a mode of beauty in its own right.  I like observing in myself and others how new ideas emerge from the cacophonic flow of thoughts and media inputs as we move through life.  This cacophony is why I also value order; the challenge of ordering ideas and thoughts into something that makes sense, or tells a story to others, is an artistic endeavor unto its own.  When I drive and walk through the desert, thoughts come and go.  Even when recording them as a voice memo, I always wonder what to do with them next … i.e. how to remediate them into something else of value to me?  Ping Myself simply offers a way to remind myself what I had thought during that time traversing the desert.  It’s a technology that let’s me touch a part of the paper and listen to a piece of my past mind, bring that thought back up to the fore, and start blending it with other voice memos activated from the same piece of paper.

Documentation

Technical Information

This memory technology utilizes a Bare Conductive Touch Board, which is attached to the back of the hanging piece. The activated black lines on the paper are drawn with Electric Paint, and are connected to copper wires, also attached to the back of the piece. When a finger or other conductive material slides across one of the active black lines, the Touch Board plays a designated audio file through a Danelectro Honeytone mini amp.