The ambience within Being practical minded, we might begin with the medium itself. Given that information rather than duration is the basic currency of digital media, it is easier to loop recurrent sounds than compose an extended linear piece of background sound. Nature is readily supplied with sound patterns made for this purpose. This contemporary attunement to ambience is quite different from our experience in traditional theatres of nature, such as the zoological gardens we have inherited from the nineteenth-century. Its symbolic habitat is the wilderness, where nature is largely hidden from sight, providing visitors with a soothing aural field of insect hum, pure light and enveloping odours.
Nothing seems further from the world evoked by today's multimedia.
Though Keats poetry is still infected with a romantic longing for transcendence, the ever elusive nature he evokes is deliberately woven into the warp of the day. I admit that Keats is hardly a sexy point of reference for multimedia, but his poetic strategy provides the starting point for a path along which we might fruitfully travel. From our ambient position, we note specifically Keats struggle to find evidence of the durability of natural form in the workings of the human soul. With Keats' help, we may begin to explore ambience not just as a soothing aural field but as an inner logic. Moving beyond the ambient clothing of these titles, the challenge is to think what it might have to say about the human condition.