Sounds of Maine-Eliza Bennett
Eliza Bennett is a senior New Media student and currently a front end developer at Redfin Solutions in Portland, Maine. Her future goals are to still delve into her UX Design skillset and her artistic background to create art and experience on a vast variety of platforms.
What is “Sounds of Maine”?
Birds of Maine is a sound-based installation built for the Maine Discovery Museum. It is a mural painted with acrylic and conductive paint with two-dimensional illustration studies of birds including the common loon, the white-breasted nuthatch, the purple finch, the hairy woodpecker, and a few other selections of “backyard” birds that you would be able to find in Maine. The installation is dedicated to creating immersive soundscapes of backyard birds and other birds commonly found in the state of Maine.
What does this project explore?
The project mainly explores the concepts of human computer interaction and user experience design to solve the problem of how can artists create platforms of creativity that is beyond what we, as a community are used to?
What is the methodology and the significance of the study?
Due to the emergence of COVID-19, however, the physical build of the mural has been delayed. However, the advent of social distancing protocols and the limitations that it has brought forth to buffering physical human connection led to the idea of bringing the mural into an online platform that would allow the audience to immerse themselves into the same soundscapes as they would experience with the mural.
In turn, this capstone project has brought on a preliminary look into a possible future of technology where everything is continuously on an upwards shift, constantly changing the way the world thinks, sees, and experiences while new ways of doing things, experiencing things, and intriguing our inner curiosities causing solutions to be consequently innovated. As we—creators, makers, artists, designers find more ways of interacting and establishing human connection, we are simultaneously searching and designing for new ways of experiencing.
Artist Introduction, Background, and Future Goals
Growing up as an artist, Eliza has always found art as a fascinating way of creating an experience, or an interaction, with the sole purpose of evoking meaningful emotions within the audience. Humans are fundamentally driven by important, thought-provoking experiences, so how can we use art to teach us about user experience design and allow our culture to break the barriers of art and technology?
Eliza has always wanted to use her hands to create things, as a maker, she is constantly drawing, painting, molding, and shaping. Gradually, this passion became a passion of creating in itself. Art is something that she found is incorporated into the process of constantly creating solutions that are effective and expressive and sometimes essential for our survival and growth as a human society.
With this project, she wanted to use her skills in creative problem solving and design skills to create a user experience while using these driving forces that encompasses everything that which we, as a community, ideate and design, with the goal of advancing and modernizing our culture. By fundamentally changing the way our brain works and receives information, changing the way art and expressionism is presented and changing the way we further develop tools, using our society as a study, she aims to create and design a new way of experiencing for children at a museum setting.
Eliza’s commissioned work for the Maine Discovery Museum has yet to be installed, but stay tuned for further news on the installation, pending the lifting of COVID-19 precautionary protocols.