I talked a little bit about my seashell/audio/installation idea in class today, which at least helped me clarify that I wanted there to be more to it. Jason from class mentioned doing something involving a range of artifacts, not neccessarily just seashells. I thought this idea was interesting, so I looked up artifacts on wikipedia, and here is a general definition: an object made or modified by a human culture which gives information about the culture or it's creators or users. The only useful examples though were vases....well, that was about it. I can see someone listening to a vase but not a bone or a piece of jewelry for some reason. After brainstorming for my "pushing the envelope" project, I got more inspired to do this project as a sort of "living" sculpture. Maybe like a freeform column of shells (and potentially other artifacts) that people can just mill around and put their ears up to different parts. I also thought about making the volume levels increase over a period of time so eventually you don't have to get right up to the shell to hear it, and in fact, all the sounds would blend together. I also thought about having sounds play intermittently thru various shells, so it would be hard to pinpoint which ones played sound and which were "dormant." I also thought it might be good to figure out how to incorporate a video element in order to up the visual factor. I am thinking maybe I should research some sculpture, nature, and video artists. The main nature artist I know of is Andy Goldsworthy........I have a good list of video artists already to research from, and no idea of any sculpture artists yet.