It’s that time of year where we submit abstracts to the student symposium! As an Intermedia MFA student, I submitted an abstract related to my thesis to the University of Maine 2022 Student Symposium (UMSS).

For those of you curious about what the abstract to an arts based thesis may look like, this is the symposium draft of it!

Your Embodied Presence and its Inherent Impact on the Relations Existing in your Present Environment

Your presence has an impact whether you realize it or not. You are one thing out of many things that make up the environment, creating multiple relations that link us with our surroundings. Through these relations, we help complete the current and future states of the items and experiences that constitute our present environments.

At minimum, our presence leaves visual and auditory impressions on our environments. Each person in a space is perceptible to other entities within this space with the ability to sense changes in waves of sound or light. A person’s physical presence can leave audible and visible traces in the surroundings beyond oneself. Our embodied existence creates unavoidable and potentially unintended impacts on current and future happenings within our direct environments.

Modern technology allows for the real-time monitoring of changes in a space. Cameras and microphones can pick up the audio and visual changes from a variety of locations. These audio and visual changes are data that can be artistically reimagined as aesthetic information. This repurposed information can be broadcast back into the environment from which it was gathered using speakers and projectors in real-time. It is one way to examine and demonstrate how relations morph and create the future of a space.

This work provides a participant an opportunity to reexamine the audio and visual relations in ones’ surroundings, highlighting relations between presence and the relations that are changed through embodied existence.