Nearly Present is an outdoor multichannel installation broadcasting live streams from around the world
Nearly Present is a configurable multichannel streaming installation where the speakers are enclosed in Wardian Cases; a 19th century metamaterial developed to facilitate the global, commercial conveyance of living plants in closed environments, and which led to global ecological cosmopolitanism
By drawing parallels between, and attention to, historical and contemporary transportations of materials within microclimates, Nearly Present provides routes into exploring the roles that the exotic, the commonplace, and the invasive, play in remote transmission and listening.
The Nearly Present artwork was commissioned by Full of Noises as part of Acoustic Commons: a Small Cooperation Project supported in part by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
Nearly Present was first exhibited in Autumn 2022 at the Acoustic Commons final exhibition: a public 'Exhibition of Sounds' in Aix-Marseille, France, produced by Locus Sonus.
It was most recently exhibited at The Birley, Preston, UK in late 2024.
Nodes and Websockets
Each case in the installation contains a pair of loudspeakers driven by a Raspberry Pi with an audio amplifier hat. Each Pi represents a node in a network of cases and bootstraps itself on startup to register on the network using websockets, connect to the locusonus server to retrieve available streams, and start playing an audio stream.
The system is thus able to host unlimited nodes
For curatorial control during exhibition, any node can also become a controller node, able to issue start, stop, reset and other commands to all nodes registered on the network.
Each node also provides a remote interface allowing streams and volumes to be changed during playback.
All live streams are sourced from the Locus Sonus locustream server e.g. http://locus.creacast.com:9001/kolkata_survey_park.mp3
Children listening to a stream of Jeju Island, Jardins du Pavilion Vendôme, Aix-Marseille, France