Andy Slater Unseen Sound

Process archive

Andy Slater is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and Disability advocate/loudmouth. This process archive charts the development of Unseen Sound — spatial audio as a wayfinding tool — from origins in Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination to presentation at the XR Access Symposium in 2024.

Archivist's statement

This expansive archive of artifacts includes precedent work (e.g., Crypto Acoustic game), documentation of the experience of Unseen Sound at the Beall exhibit, documentation and exploration of the sound files that comprise Unseen Sound, an artist talk about the work, as well as other iterations of the work. Both Unseen Sound, and conversations with Andy, inspired a related access experiment: a text adventure game that tours the E.A.A.T exhibition. Viewers might also notice the similarity of this experiment’s blue interface to Andy’s own work within the archive.

2023-2024
Residency at Thoughtworks Arts

Room with a circular table against the back wall. A chair sits in front of the table, facing the wall. A large monitor displays text “Some of them will be loud and some of them will be quiet” Across from the monitor is a short bench. — Unseen Sound by Andy Slater

Artist Statement

Andy Slater is a Chicago-based media artist, composer, sculptor, writer, performer, teaching artist—and a 37th-level blind person. His work is rooted in access authorship: making access a central creative force rather than an afterthought. Marked by humor, a sharp Crip attitude, and a refusal to surrender the narrative, his projects span extended reality, sound performance, and installation—often shaped by sci-fi world-building, retrofuturism, and blind histories or futures. Slater’s practice interrogates who institutions are built for—and who is forced to transpose themselves to enter. His work tracks how culture, technology, and even “access” get designed from the outside—and who ends up doing the work to close that distance.

As a blind person Andy knows that his work will always be seen as political whether he likes it or not, from the bleep blorp sounds all the way down to his white cane taps, - and that’s really funny to him.

Unseen Sound Documentation (Final Version)

Project Description

In Unseen Sound, Andy Slater uses spatial audio as a wayfinding tool to remap and reorient lived experiences of real and virtual space. Created with virtual gallery New Art City’s space-building engine, this virtual experience invites players to navigate a nonvisual space entirely by sound. As players use a joystick to wander and explore, they encounter and trigger sonic events that seem to emanate from unknown worlds. Referencing the phenomena of Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucinations, or phantom sounds heard by individuals that defy scientific explanation, Unseen Sound uses audio as material for science fiction worldbuilding. These sounds activate real-time sonic descriptive texts that appear on a large monitor in the installation. Just as the sounds encountered in the virtual world are enigmatic, these sonic descriptions guide visitors through another uncharted form of access that at times clarify, and at other moments confuse. Embodying blind modalities of being, Slater’s work reimagines drifting as aural adventure through a speculative sonic environment.