Refraction asked Juno-nominated record producer, multimedia artist, educator, and developer Noah Pred to discuss his project: 'Metamedia' funded in part by the Refraction Community Grant. Noah's immersive audio-visual works have been presented at MUTEK Montréal, despace Berlin, and Sónar Barcelona. He founded and launched Metamedia with somaticbits.
All embedded pieces on this page are fully interactive Metamedia works: hover over a piece to reveal the control menu, click the play button to start audio and video, click circular layer toggles to interact. Best viewed on desktop using a Chrome-based browser.
I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with Refraction since its inception. Like so many, I was thrilled with the re-evaluation of digital-native art in those heady early days of Hic et Nunc. For me, digital-native means work that is animated, interactive, or both: art that can’t be fully presented without a digital interface of some kind.
Collecting digital-native art, a gap revealed itself: most image, audio, animated, and video work doesn’t take full advantage of the browser you’re viewing it with. Early interactive works provided tantalizing glimpses into new modes of engagement, but unfortunately, the ability to incorporate interactivity remained inaccessible to most artists.
Aside from a vanguard of creative coders and generative pioneers, sophisticated artists using otherwise highly technical software didn’t seem to have pathways to express their intricate outputs interactively.
Metamedia aims to bridge this gap by freely providing artists of all disciplines an interactive, multimedia container to share their work in newly dynamic and engaging ways.
“Metamedia made it super easy to create an interactive piece, and opened up possibilities I hadn’t previously explored with my art. I'm looking forward to exploring more of its potential!” - Polyforms
As a practicing producer and artist myself, Metamedia provides an exciting new format to conceive and share rich, multilayered works. I’m also an educator and active developer for my company, Manifest Audio. Earlier stages of my career focused on condensing creativity into fixed outputs — mostly records. Now I find myself leaning more toward opening doors of possibility for others.
Inspired by poetry’s on-chain digital renaissance, the initial idea for Metamedia arrived as a multidimensional medium for verse: it could include text, of course, along with a reading from the poet, as well as image, video, or even ambient soundtrack layers too – all presented together as optional layers, to be toggled, explored, and re-combined by the end user. That was my first thought. But I soon realized the potential it held for all forms of digital art: music, photography, video – even for curated outputs of generative work.
Without the full-stack coding background to make Metamedia a reality, I was luckily able to convince the multi-talented somaticbits to join forces. Our proposal won a Refraction Community Grant, and now Metamedia is free for artists of all disciplines to use and explore – with ample documentation to help the code-averse navigate the micro-dose of HTML required. Artists of all backgrounds can now use Metamedia to create and present their own multilayered, interactive work, online, today.
“I love this multilayered interactive format combining different mediums. It makes you think differently about your art, in layers, like a puzzle, with each piece harmonizing with every other to create a sum greater than its parts.” - Portrait XO
You can think of Metamedia as a four-dimensional multimedia collage.
Video and image layers can be placed or collaged in three dimensions:
Audio and video layers offer a fourth dimension: time. In the end, viewers engage with Metamedia artworks as a sort of four-dimensional container for the imagination of the artist.
Shifting from fixed outputs to dynamic world-building empowers artists to explore new contexts and concepts in their work. No longer limited by the need to collapse expressions to a single piece of media, artists can expose elements of their process that would typically remain invisible – or simply provide presentational flexibility previously out of reach. Upgrading viewers from passive recipients to active participants, Metamedia might even challenge power structures implicit in the traditional dynamics of conventionally unidirectional art consumption.
"It has been deeply rewarding to begin to explore audio-visual work beyond the constraints of streaming services or traditional club spaces. I remain enamored by the possibility of using collective multi-media experiences to engage participants in meaningful, transformative dialogue.” - Deepchild
The initial layers configured by the artist provide a starting point. From there, viewers choose their own adventure — within the artist’s constraints — opening dialogue between art/ist and audience.
Participation is the key that unlocks the world constructed by the artist. With every interaction altering the presentation, viewers can surface combinations the artist hadn’t necessarily conceived. Aiming beyond static artifacts, Metamedia opens pathways to multitudes of potential states.
In Art and Computation, Miguel Carvalhais writes: “...interactors have more than a simple capacity to act within a system, they have agency to choose how to act in a context. And what can be more consequential than shaping the very context where one acts?”
Exploring and recombining multidimensional elements of a Metamedia piece, the relational context embedded in any process is brought to the foreground. Blurring the boundaries of creativity, the artistic “unit” expands from a single incarnation to a curated set of possibilities: a co-creative process, a p/layer (of layers) — a “we-mix”, if you will.
"Metamedia for me is such an amazing tool to encounter, the idea of involving various kinds of assets as layers resonates with one of my early ideas regarding interactive/generative websites. It helps me explore my fascination with states between determinacy and indeterminacy of sounds and motions. It’s almost like an ode to “total media” where all are integrated as one. Allowing the audience to freely explore and choose layers that they want to see is really a strong subtle aspect of this tool that I love so much.” - Rangga Purnama Aji
Metamedia's emphasis on interaction makes explicit the entanglement between artwork and observer. Changing in response to interactions, those same changes act upon the viewer; our actions affect the world, which, in effect, change ourselves in the process. Being in the world is recursive, reflexive, fluid, and alive.
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