Projects
Projects
THE ELEPHANTS
OF
TRIANON
The Elephants of Trianon is an augmented-reality audiovisual installation that extends a series of public murals into an interactive spatial sound environment. The original work consists of ten adjacent murals painted on garage doors in a public alley; these form part of a larger international body of public mural works by the artist. For the International Computer Music Conference, the project is presented as a free-standing installation at TU Hamburg-Harburg using ten large construction-fence banners, each displaying one mural. These images are activated with a custom Augmented Reality app designed for The Elephants of Trianon. The mobile app responds to these images only and so must be pointed at one of them to activate.
Using a custom mobile app, visitors’ devices recognize each mural and anchor a corresponding three-dimensional audiovisual scene in space. As visitors move through the installation and activate additional murals, these scenes accumulate and blend, creating a continuously evolving environment rather than a sequence of isolated works. The installation therefore functions as a spatial composition shaped by listener movement, attention, and duration of engagement.
The soundscape combines field recordings made in Bali, New Orleans, and Chicago with instrumental layers and voices in ten languages. Animated three-dimensional forms—birds, bats, dogs, elephants, rabbits, and celestial figures—appear among the murals, along with subtle video textures and custom shaders that bring painted elements into motion. Some virtual elements are not confined to a single mural but move through the installation space, responding to the physical layout and dimensions of the exhibition environment.
The project contributes a scalable model for mobile, spatially responsive sound installations in galleries and public spaces. The software framework and mobile application used in The Elephants of Trianon have been developed through prior public installations and gallery presentations and are designed to function across a range of exhibition formats, from outdoor murals to indoor projection and free-standing display structures. The ICMC installation demonstrates how augmented reality can be used not only as a visual medium, but as a platform for spatial audio composition and listener-driven musical form.
The artists wish to express their deep appreciation to the International Computer Music Conference, Ligeti Zentrum, and TU Hamburg-Harburg for their support and assistance in producing the banners and presenting this installation. We especially thank Jacob Sello at Ligeti Zentrum for all his efforts, communications, and great ideas in preparing this piece.
Painter Teresa Parod has created over one hundred works of public art in the United States, Cuba, Bali, Nepal, and Istanbul. In Cuba, she was honored to work with mosaicist José Fuster, whose work inspired her creation of art in unexpected and underused spaces. These as well as her vibrant, luminous oil paintings can be seen at teresaparod.com.
Bill Parod is a composer who creates spatial music environments shaped by harmonic tuning, generative processes, and evolving sonic systems. His work develops listening fields in which musical ecologies emerge through relationships among sound, movement, and attention, often in collaboration with painter Teresa Parod.
The map show's the installation location for ICMC at TUHH, Harburg-Hamburg, Germany. The following video is a screen capture of the companion app to The Elephants of Trianon, using Augmented Reality, it activates a layered spatial audio-visual experience around selected murals. It was recorded at the original murals in Evanston, IL, US. It will be replaced with a recording of the ICMC installation once we are on-site.
The next eight images are of the nine murals in the eastern half of the alley behind 2300 Thayer St, Evanston, IL.
This A/R scene is over “Trianon”, a mural named for a cafe in Alexandria, Egypt and reminiscent of one in New Orleans. Crowd sounds, passing motorbikes, restaurant sounds of plates and cutlery and New Orleans music are part of the soundtrack. The music was recorded in a Bywater vacant lot after an unofficial parade in New Orleans during Carnival season. The combination of its "New Orleans Sound" and Arabic scales makes it a perfect music for this New Orleans / Alexandria mural. If anyone recognizes or participated in the music, please contact me. I would love to know who to credit. (Thayer St alley)
Solar System by Teresa Parod
The owners of this garage wanted a space theme and liked the proposed image. The A/R was looking for a universal message and it is translated here into 8 languages by Google Translate and spoken in various voices from AWS Poly.
Bali by Teresa Parod
This mural patron wanted a scene with palms. The mural by Teresa Parod depicts a Balinese landscape. The soundscape is made from various sounds recorded in Bali, including a stream, frogs, motorbikes, a cremation procession, and bats.
2319 by Teresa Parod
This mural, "2319" is on the garage of our house and is a painting of the front of our house. The A/R app uses image recognition to place home movies from our early days into the mural's windows. More recent photos of the family ride on roller-coaster cars around the outside of the house, up and down the trees.
The action on the inside shows our story time upstairs. Downstairs is Sereana and then Julius dancing to Stevie Wonder in the living room. And both are working in the kitchen on lower right. Unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we had to mute the audio from the living room video - which was joyously blasting Stevie Wonder's "Songs In The Key of Life".
Sunflowers by Teresa Parod
For Sunflowers the patron wanted flowers on her door. Birds always sound great and those that feed on flowers are especially wonderful to watch. Here we use hummingbirds an and butterflies with sound formed from buzzing dissonant flutes.
Stella by Teresa Parod
Stella was the beloved family dog for this patron. She's wearing lipstick for her sitting here. Her animation barks off the harassing crows as other dogs in the neighborhood join in her alarm.
Monarchs by Teresa Parod
Adjacent fences are painted with beautiful monarch butterflies. Their animated flight is accompanied by violin melodies. Each section is independently responsive to its image recognition in the app.
Elephants by Teresa Parod
These purple elephants step out of the mural to parade up and down the alley. Watch out!
Birds on a Wire by Teresa Parod
These crows like to enjoy the full moon from the electrical wires, but these wires are faulty. Watch out, birds! This mural is in the alley of the 2700 block of North 90th Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Homage To Sondra by Teresa Parod
Homage to Sondra is about historic cottages on the street where I live. I use the term historic loosely as it seems all the neighbors have a different idea of their history but no one knows exactly what that history is. We all agree that they are charming and unique. Sondra was a long time resident of one of the cottages and a true eccentric character. When she began talking, it was impossible to leave as she never stopped. Her words were at times brilliant, funny, petty, inspiring, mean, fun, thoughtful, dramatic, loving, ridiculous, sad, epic, joyous but always interesting and definitely non stop. She told me she had lunch with Picasso, inspiring him when she held up the skeleton of a fish she had just eaten. She ate lobster in the White House and gave the president’s advisors advice, She hugged John Travolta in our alley, which was very embarrassing to her because she wasn’t wearing a bra. I always considered her a genius of some kind,
She was beautiful, though she told me she hadn’t taken a bath in 12 years, wore the same torn black dress with falling apart shoes everyday, and probably hadn’t combed her hair since the Carter administration. Sondra passed several years ago and I often miss the old girl. What I would give to hear one of her extended conversations. I picture her biking in heaven, because she told me often she wished she could still ride a bike.
The mural is at the rear of Endoscopy Center of the North Shore, 1732 Central Street, Evanston, IL. Or visit the mural image.