junebug codes

Since April 2024, I’ve been undertaking the Develop Your Creative Practice grant, as administered by Arts Council England. It’s been an incredible journey, and I feel trusted as an artist, freelancer, and specialist in my field to be given funds to explore the topic of my choosing. This blog post is a retrospective on the ‘activity’, as ACE specifies. I’ll have other posts on what I learned and the impact moving forward.

I made the first commit to the repository https://github.com/junekuhn/dycp-immersive-web-audio/ on April 2, and spent the month building an initial prototype that demonstrated two key insights into immersive web audio. I created two scenes, one with Three.js positional audio, and the other with JSAmbisonics, a library developed at the University of York that delivers general purpose ambisonics with javascript. In building the prototype, I was hacking things together based on what I thought would work; modifying controls until I could myself navigate around using screenreader tech.

I had two important sessions during this month. In my meeting with Tim, I discovered that I didn’t have the budget to hire Drake Music to host workshops for my prototype. He suggested to me that I put out an open call, and I did that instead, with his help and examples of open calls that he’d done in the past.

I also met a few times with Olivia, who helped me with the development of creative technology, and keeping my activity in the realm of creative practice, instead of the typical software development cycle. She suggested that I, instead of having an instructions screen (what I made in April), make the instructions experiential and a part of the navigation.

In May and June, I moved in to my new studio and the DYCP took a bit of a backseat while I prepared my studio for the upcoming sessions in July and August. But since this whole thing is about artistic practice, I want to mention a few things that happened. I had a freelance gig making a website for a freelance photographer, performed several times with my solo act as softshadow, and worked as a freelance developer for Outlandish almost full time through the month of June. My creative career had never seemed to be stronger, and I could feel a confidence I’ve never had. I also discovered through music festivals and prolonged reflection that I was no longer genderqueer, I prefer to be addressed as a woman.

In July, I began the testing and development sessions with 5 artists who responded to the open call. Each artist had varying levels of experience with digital technology, and by chance it produced a very diverse set of people, across age range, technical ability, and device preference. 1 of the sessions was remote, as one artist lived in Wales and I had assistance from her PA, who was sighted. 1 artist was sighted and used other kinds of browser tools, the others had varying levels of sight, each with their own methods with navigating phones and desktop devices.

I found these sessions to be the real work of the project, testing my abilities to accommodate and understand our transit systems, and my patience with how frustrating and difficult screenreaders are to design for. Voiceover on IOS and Mac is decent enough, and Talkback less so, but these technologies are still like adding a wheelchair ramp with a 20 degree incline so the building is ADA ‘compliant’. They’re an afterthought; I struggled even as a developer to understand what was happening and I had to constantly figure out what went wrong after each session was over.

Every artist I worked with was a delight and was much more patient than I. Lynn, a career artist and audio description expert, had strong experience with immersive technology and helped me through a lot of my mistakes in understanding screen readers. Net, a recent graduate from the Royal College of Arts, assisted me as a sighted participant to provide feedback on how the experience feels as a specialist in digital art and experiential design. A blind theatremaker (anonymous), had wonderful ideas about the applications of the software, from orchestra to the supermarket. Karina, an actor and aerialist who had never used a game controller, headset, or binaural audio before, had found serious interest in using the Xbox controller to navigate quickly through virtual space. Tafsila, who attended sessions remotely, hopes to use this technology in the future for “touch tours” for improving access to theatre.