Pressure Project 3 – Ashley

My pressure project 3 uses the Makey Makey to create an interactive auditory experience from one of my favorite novels. Our task was to share a story that was important to us and culturally relevant, so I decided to include an excerpt from author Akwaeke Emezi’s “Freshwater”.  Emezi is a queer, Nigerian and Tamil writer whose practice is rooted deeply in the footing of Black radical feminism and Igbo folklore.

This novel is an inspiration and was foundational to my research and art practice when I first entered graduate school. For a little bit of background, the book is what Emezi describes as “autobiographical fiction” in which they pull from parts of their own experience and mix it with fiction to create these fantastic moments of storytelling and truth.

For the interactive element, I knew that I wanted to include my copy of the book because it’s so important to me. I returned to using the conductive paint, where I made my own fingerprints as triggers on the pages to activate the sound. The sound is an excerpt of the book, read by Emezi themself. I also wanted to be intentional about where I placed the fingerprint marks, so that they would resemble to act of holding the book as you would naturally.

My Isadora setup was fairly simple. I made a patch that connected the sound player to a keyboard watcher that would trigger it to play. I also had background music that would play when you entered the scene.

Here is documentation of the interaction: