Drawing from Sauna : Mapping Meaning Between, Across and Through Mediums

Abstract

This essay gives an account of the origin, creative process, and execution of the BA New Media Composition graduation piece Drawing from Sauna. The text draws thematical lines from a haunting teenage daydream to describe the nuts and bolts of a transdisciplinary approach, including harvesting sound material from memories using methods and a mindset transduced from the field of Foley, curating audio datasets informed by the architectural properties of how sounds are organized in the latent spaces of neural networks, and using neural audio synthesis to recreate the perceived filter of memory. Aspects of interaction design and how scenographic elements can function both as metaphorical semantic after-images and controllers for digital instruments are discussed. The text draws on terminology from linguistics, Peircean semiotics, and Thor Magnusson’s concept of ergomimesis to dismantle the conseptual layers of the work. The term “semantic vanishing point” is proposed in the thesis to describe and contextualize the culmination of the dream theoretically.