Between Us (2019)

Between Us (2019)

Between Us is an Augmented Reality audio/visual artwork about desire, solar physics and the impossibility of touch. Between Us is made for Magic Leap and Sennheiser AMBEO 3D audio.

Drawing on quantum physicist Karen Barad’s work on touch, the narrative in Between Us is at once seductive and unsettling. 

Participants inhabit an audio/visual world where they are addressed directly through the narrative. Immersed in the 3D soundscape and visuals, the participant is both audience and artwork, guided by a disembodied voice that speaks of solar physics and the haunting nature of desire, the anticipative action of touch. 

Between Us allows us to sonically and visually inhabit the temporary intimate fusing of the outer edge of our atmosphere as it meets the sun’s radiative action - the ionosphere where the sun and the earth first touch. Our skin is constantly filtering air, reacting to temperature changes, signaling hormonal drives, fears and desires. In likening the ionosphere to the skin of our bodies we may by able to imagine the invisible interactions taking place between things and selves, things and things, and selves and selves. In sonifying this interaction we inhabit where the sun and the earth meet, where the ionosphere draws towards the sun like the pilomotor reflexes of the tiny hairs on our skin. The desirous nature of Between Us evokes the dynamic interplay between two bodies or systems, where we inhabit the in-between, the invisible interactions that take place where attraction and repulsion reside. 

Artist and director: Jane Grant, Sound Design: Jay Auborn, Visual Design: Coral Manton 

Illustration by Skye Liu Tianzi 2018.

Funded by SWCTN and University of Plymouth.

Between Us was premiered at ISEA Lux Aeterna(International Symposium of Electronic Art) June, 2019 in Korea. It was also exhibited at Watershed, Bristol, June 2019 as part of the SWCTN prototype showcase.