SonicSENSE was created by Barney Haynes and Jennifer Parker in 2008 as an expandable and evolving site for art, culture, new technologies, digital media, collaboration, and participation.

photo by: Monica Roy

SonicSENSE uses the creative diversity of computational media and traditional visual art practices to cultivate space for sharing, questioning, and exploring interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, and experiences.

photo by: Monica Roy

Each exhibition of the platform is a new iteration consisting of a series of mechanical sound sculptures and interactive objects that drive data mined from the internet and biometrics gleaned from the audience.

photo by: Monica Roy

Artists, musicians, creative programmers, and scientists have been invited to write software and create new hardware components to leverage the unique qualities of this extensible platform.

photo by: Monica Roy

Engagement with the project is twofold. One is through the interactivity of live-viewer’s as a means to capture information and create feedback loops for robotics to respond to and react. This type of interactivity suggests a kind of co-dependency between the viewer and the piece, between the body and technology.

The second realm of engagement with the work is accessible and programmable via the internet allowing for continued interactions and collaborative acts to occur between the installation, the artists and their institutions, and the viewers in exhibition space.

photo by: Monica Roy

Participating universities, galleries and institutions include University of California Sant Cruz; California College of the Arts in Oakland/San Francisco, CA; College of Creative Studies, University of California Santa Barbara; GAFFTA, San Francisco; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; Maker Faire, San Mateo, CA; The Lab in San Francisco; ZER01 San Jose: Galerie Califia in Horazdovice, South Bohemia; Školská 28 Galerie; and the Insitutue of Intermedia in Prague, Czech Republic.