The future's so bright I gotta wear headphones!

I've been keeping this under wraps, but now it's confirmed and I can go public. I'll be spending six weeks -- from mid-January to the end of February next year -- doing a sound art project at Future University, Hakodate, Hokkaido. Lehan Ramsay, an Australian academic at the university's Communication department, approached me a couple of months ago about this and I sent a proposal called Lost Radio Found Sound. That proposal has now been accepted, and I'll be in Hokkaido through two of the coldest months of winter, collecting sounds with the help of students and locals and turning them into a web-streaming art radio station.



The university -- which has a campus as futuristic as its name -- is focused on technology and communication. I'll be based in a small building off campus called the Art Harbour, which has a gallery on the ground floor and living quarters upstairs.



Here's an excerpt from my original proposal:

Based in the Art Harbour, Lost Radio Found Sound will have as its goal the encouragement of cognition rather than recognition, texture rather than text. Together with students from the Communication Department and local people, Momus will work on the generation, manipulation, editing, compiling and broadcasting of various types of sound, found on the web and also recorded locally in Hakodate. There will be a temporary installation in the Art Harbour, an interactive exhibition space where visitors can produce and play with sound, generating their own material for the broadcasts. The emphasis will be on sound's capacity to transport us to interesting locations, but also on its tactile and textural qualities; using small digital devices like sound-capable cameras and keitai phones, participants will collect 'found sound objects'. These might be the 'sounds of food', unreliable and inarticulate documentaries on local wildlife, humming, the sound of cooking and dancing, or speech used for its textural qualities rather than the transmission of information. For two months Hakodate will be transformed into a kind of electronic Prospero's Island: a place full of 'airs and sounds which give delight, and harm not'.



I'm really delighted to be doing this project. I've never been to Hokkaido, but from the photos I've found of Hakodate it has an intriguingly Russian look to it.