Sound Creature Observation Tour
Performance / Workshop
2020​
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This piece was created during COVID-19 in 2020 in the US. It happened while everyone followed stay at home orders.
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Plup plup plup….. Grrrrrrrr…….. Pip pip pip pico pico pico.....
Let's visit and explore an imaginary world together. A world with fantastical creatures, where they would only show up in a time-space when people share their presence together digitally. Here I invite you to join a journey in discovering new creatures and sharing your discoveries and observations with your peers on this trip. What animal have you found? How do they look and what do they sound like?What do they eat? And where do they live? Do the animals all sing together?
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The Sound Creature Observation Tour guides participants to draw, describe and make noises for creatures from their imagination. The aim of this workshop is to create connections by doing something slightly outside of one's comfort zone when sharing weird noises with strangers Facilitated by the artist, under a plot as creature researchers on an island, participants share their discoveries under different sound, drawing and storytelling exercises.
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As an artist, I try to create conversations about is breaking public boundaries to celebrate qualities of care and empathy. Vulnerable yet human qualities, such as cuteness, silliness, clumsiness, and imagination; humanities that sometimes we are shy to or can not present out loud due to external circumstances and social expectations. Since 2018, I have been trying to create spaces to allow this kind of interaction to happen in my art.
I made Animal Calls, an interactive experience that invites people to make noises for animals in a mural in a public hallway, in early 2020. A surrounding soundscape of accumulated human-made animal calls is formed throughout the duration of the piece by collective participation efforts. Then when Coronavirus got worse, I wanted to preserve the sound sharing experience in a way that people could still access distantly. Therefore, I transitioned the experience into Sound Creature Observation Tour, an online workshop and performance that shares a similar concept on empathy and vulnerability, on the video conference platform Zoom.
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