Name: Christy Westhovens
Year of Birth: 1996
Place of Birth: Dordrecht, Netherlands
Graduated from the ABK in Maastricht in 2020. As a graduation project, she developed portable boxes that convert the body's electrical charge into sound. Touching a surface in space is converted into a tone and thus a live soundscape of a body is created. She will conduct research into how she can further develop these boxes and how she can make the interaction of a person with objects and surfaces and the interaction between different people in the room audible.
What will you be focussing on during your period at Intro?
“I would like to further develop an existing project. I have indeed developed actual boxes that have data about the capacity of the visitor's body built into sound live. This ensures that the visitor can move and explore other / elements / objects by taste and hear these movements one on one in a soundscape. But I'm still in the early stages of this project. It is important to me that you can look when you can feel that you are playing with a different principle of nature. So I'd like to be researching key scenarios and how these sounds interact in varying proportions. And I want to build a system to determine the location of these boxes so that the visitors can better distinguish their own from others. A system in which the sound not only changes audibly with the movements of the visitors, but also literally takes into account the spaces of people through the space.
This project includes what I would like to do to and receive with sound and how visitors experience this when they can handle it themselves by 'playing' with elements naturally present in the environment. I want to meet this auditory experience of the sense of touch, to encourage people to explore with their bodies.
In general, I hope to gain more knowledge about (the physical background of) sound, in order to arrive at a logical whole. I find it difficult to work with knowledge because I have so little about this subject. I imagine that the live performance can teach me a lot about the experience of this work, and that I can re-implement that knowledge to develop new forms for this project.
Finally, I would like people to be able to walk into a building, take a locker with them, and explore with everything that is already there and feel that they can collaborate with others. I hope this leads to a kind of spiritual, auditory experience that explores the physical connections between bodies and
their environment.”
