Hear and There (2021)

Hear and There was AEA’s second major collaborative project, and took place between January and April of 2021. During this time period, the three of us were all living in different cities across Canada, in a time of social isolation. We wanted to focus on the small network of our friendship as we remained physically distanced, and create a way of communicating and sharing a virtual space.

For the entire month of February, each of us recorded under 60 seconds of audio and compiled it together on our website hearandthere.ca (which has now since expired), thinking about the highlights of our days, occasional prompts, the locations we resided in, and what we simply wished to share with one another. This website was the first phase of the project, as it allows the viewer to play any audio from any day all at once, blurring the boundaries of linear time and space. During March we moved onto the second phase of the project: the Soundcloud platform. We combined the three audios from each day into one amalgamated audio to represent our shared day, using Davinci Resolve to add elements such as moving from one ear to another, to allow different aspects of each audio to weave in and out of focus. We also hand drew visualization illustrations of each day based off the three individual recordings in order to have a visual representation of our shared experience on top of the audio one. These visualizations served as the “album covers” for each sound file, which ended up being uploaded as a playlist on Soundcloud titled February.