The Buzz

Year: 2018

An installation in the form of furniture clusters and a live soundscape, The Buzz creates a commons for activities of slowed time and loose attention: idling, lounging, watching, or listening. The project fills sites across the UCLA landscape with collective media: images, architecture, and sound sampled from campus sites. Image samples are combined through techniques of vision normally experienced by a single observer – phone panoramas, VR environments, and aerial drone cameras – to form furniture, rendering these techniques as social amenities. The soundscape is a live composition, actively combining field recordings, live feedback of the environment, and generative music that changes over the course of the day, week, and month. This research seeks to reinvigorate the discourse of media environments by shifting the focus away from the vertical surface of buildings toward the horizontal landscape of the city and the collective media that frames our experiences of it. 

The Buzz is a collaboration by UCLA faculty and students from Architecture & Urban Design, cityLAB, Musicology, and REMAP and led by Gabriel Fries-Briggs, Dana Cuff, Tamara Levitz, and Jeff Burke. It is supported by a 2018 UCLA Arts Initiative Grant as part of the “Campus as Canvas” grant cycle. The installation was on view at 5 sites from November 2 through December 14, 2018.