Xenotone Field Kit

The process of making Miner’s Journey was one of gathering many hundreds of photos, videos, 3D scans, audio recordings, text notes and other elements on site. Back in the studio they were sorted into folders in a digital archive, and in being stored their interrelatedness dissolved—while each file kept its name, date, location and other metadata, they lost their connection to each of the other elements they were once tied closely to. Given that the entanglement of these elements is central to my practice and its evolving methods, I found myself having to rebuild the connections by hand.

The Xenotone Field Kit grew out of reflecting on that process. The field kit is an evolving set of software tools and related material practices, for collecting field notes for critical immersive visualisation projects. It keeps the notes connected to the site they were made in from the moment they’re made. Each note is placed where it was captured and can be revisited there in AR or explored remotely. Threads can be drawn between notes, so a line of inquiry (for example, moss) can be followed from site to site rather than sitting in separate folders. Ecologically, they are placed within the Xenotone, now finding their place in this overlap between physical and digital ecologies with the day’s weather, sound and light recorded alongside them.

The Field Kit is a working prototype, and it is designed to remain that way in that it is a tool designed for practice and it evolves along side of this practice. It already contains the beginnings of an archive I can walk through: notes, scans and composed sound layered back onto, and entangled with their wider ecologies.