Interface Consultant
David Bartolo

"... like an earthquake that suddenly comes into your life and reduces your life into nothing, and when you return to normality your perceptions, your feelings are different. Everytime I see a landstorm, I remember my own landstorm. Very personal... it's like a little secret always I have with me." Juan Miranda, Shock in the Ear

Shock in the Ear is is an experimental new media art work. It evokes the moment of shock and its aftermath, as a sensual experience. From culture shock to electric shock and reverberating beyond into shock aesthetics, shock resonates with deep and abrupt physical and psychic change.

The project of Shock in the Ear is to engage the user at a sensual level with shock as a bodily experience -- to evoke shock not at the crashing sensational moment of impact but its sensual aftermath. It aims to disrupt perceptions as the user explores the moment after the event -- a dislocated time/space of shifted perceptions and senses.

Shock in the Ear expresses the shocking concept that sound is essential to interactivity, as a new and engaging artistic form, because sound goes beyond the interface, into time, into the body, and into the imagination. Visually, the work disrupts conventional CDROM aesthetics and kinaesthetics, with its painterly, textured and sensuous images - images that interrogate painting conventions and history and play with the relation between painting and multimedia.

Creating and articulating sound and image together in an innovative way, Shock in the Ear engages with interactive possibilities beyond simple point-and -click, immersing the user in emotional, sonic and visual texture. At the moment of interactivity, the work opens up the CDROM medium's potential for intimacy.

Shock in the Ear is an intense and poetic work, composed through interactive screens, stories, performances, music, and sound. Refusing the slickness and control of cyberspace, the work explores instead the potential of new media for poetic movement, understandings, emotions, and sensations.

Shock in the Ear was developed with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission. The assistance of the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, the Listening Room (ABC Radio Arts), and The University of Technology, Sydney are gratefully acknowledged.