The environment around us is a mass of sensory information, some of it easy to detect, playing on our visual, aural, olfactory, gustatory and tactile senses, while others are less perceptible - electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, infra-red light etc - and yet these imperceptible streams interact with us regularly as we go about our everyday lives.

As part of our research for Sensory Threads, Proboscis will lead a workshop at Dislocate08 to engage artists, urbanists, designers, technologists, musicians and dancers in an active investigation into the sensorial patterns and rhythms to be found in our environment. The area around ZAIM in Yokohama will become our research field as we seek out and evidence the recurring, overlapping and intersecting sounds and movements that take place as we act in, and react to, our environment.

*  *  *

Sensory Threads is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors' datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi- dimensional soundscape feeding back the players' journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them.  We aim to premiere the work in 2009.

Sensory Threads is being created by Proboscis in collaboration with Birkbeck College's Pervasive Computing Lab, The Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary (University of London), the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and the School of Management at University of Southampton.