in collaboration with Bryan Cera.

For Social Sonic Architecture #3, a microphone records real-time sounds from a single participant, which is then echoed across 36 individually addressable speakers, one at a time. Speak softly, and your voice travels slowly – many race (and win) against the vestigial traces of their own whispers, dashing across the room. Produce loud and harsh audio, and your projected booms zip ahead, impossible to keep up with.

Bryan Cera and Nathaniel Stern produced and installed Social Sonic Architecture #3 in 2014 as part of their duo exhibition “Vital Technologies,” at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD). It is a 36-foot-long chain of speakers and a condenser microphone, inviting participants to contribute their vocal interactions, which are then spatially displaced and temporally delayed. Their sounds are doubly echoed, both in the software and across MIAD’s long gallery, based on short bursts of activity. The piece creates a kind of sonic architecture, as audio moves and is moved in and around itself and others, while also producing new potentials for social space, as participants and speakers, electrical currents and other actants, disperse, interfere, resonate, and play.