YAK is a collaborative project with Joseph Burgess combining interactive sound technology, participatory performance practices, and furniture design. YAK is a chair for many and responds to bodies as they trigger an evolving soundscape. The seating becomes an experiential invitation shaped by participants as their bodies animate and advance the soundscape through interaction with one another and the physical structure itself.
YAK - as in yakking and idle chatter- is designed to create dialogues between bodies and environment.
The chair acts as both a physical and poetic invitation to link internal worlds and attune to external worlds. Influenced by Brandon Labelle’s definitions of acoustic care, the work facilitates an attunement to timings and spacings, social arrangements and bodily gestures, and structures needed to support a sensitivity for listening. In this way, YAK becomes a composition - a score or an instrument that enables social, political, and physical choreographic dramaturgies to emerge.
Through networks of sensors, the work takes an expanded choreographic approach to also explore how distinctions between the ‘animate’ x ‘inanimate’ might be dissolved. The liveness of the material world is literally amplified to draw attention to the animate adaptations of fibres, wood, and hardware.
Whilst sound becomes the conduit for being-together and becoming-with, the work is equally concerned with a broader ecology of attention beyond the audible and the sounded.
To be presented in public spaces, YAK is fully realised when it’s situated in a place that can create the most exchange - where tangential contextual influence and multi-species interactions (like trees or wildlife) might occur. Where both private moments in public spaces can arise within the work and it can become part of a larger terrain to be encountered from afar by witnesses. An exercise in upscale loitering.
DESIGN
For the design process we experimented with clay, 3D scanning, using choreographic scores to create VR design at human scale, and Blender modeling software. From this process a palette of biomorphic shapes akin to pelvic plates and ears emerged. These shapes’ alignment with notions of receptivity, attunement, and listening became the premise for the first prototype we created in July 2024.
Supported by Sunshine Coast Council’s Project24 Residency x FutureNOW Program, the Regional Arts Development Fund partnership between the Queensland Government and Sunshine Coast Council to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland, and the Sunshine Coast Arts Foundation’s Gifted Program.