MATR: Mobile Apparatus for Temporality Research

Our world is rapidly changing: new forms of time are emerging: shockingly rapid events and extremely long events -- millions of years long -- that are shaping us, and the world, in as yet unknowable ways.  These forms of time are little sensed -- for after all how do we sense such slow changes? This project, MATR, seeks to engage this question by developing a “sense organ” for hearing new forms of time. This app, designed by the research collective spurse, is part an experimental music generator, part a wayfinding device and part a sensing system for large scale forces.

How does it work? MATR streams data from large scale and micro scale temporal phenomena and transforms it via non-linear processes into a dimensional sound field, attuning one to fundamentally unseeable large and small scale forces. The pulse, amplitude, and timbre of this interactive sound experiment will be completely controlled by the collected data variables. Please join us in evolving this work, download, use and tell us what happened -- does it change how you sense, move, or interact?

During the 2011 CAFKA bienial: “Survive. Resist.”, spurse set up a temporary research site outside Kitchener City Hall (Ontario, Canada) where the public was introduced to the use of MATR. Participants conducted specific research exercises, collected data and brought their experiences back to the research center. This information will be fused to evolve the sense organ and help to broaden the scope of MATR research. This app has been developed in  collaboration with the Communitech App Factory, and the arts organization CAFKA by spurse.