The Red CokeCan Chicken Massacre

So..a terrible toothache had the best out of me for the last two weeks, but finally I'm my brain is back into function. Two of the red bins are installed. They're in two of the chicken shops around the East London Mosque in Whitechapel. As I work in the pub next door I though it was a good idea keep the locations as local as possible - if the bin is full I can just pop by to the shops and collect/put a new bin bag. Today's the first day. Cross fingers and I really hope not to find too many chicken bones covered in mayonnaise in the bins..signing off..

The Curse of the Red Spray CAN!!!

YEAH!!! Things are finally moving on in the installations’ realms..

I got two on the go, one due for next week –Valentine’s day- in the Atrium of the London College of Communication’s Media Block, and the other due for the end of may, of which you can read more on details by scrolling down to the previous post, but bare with me and you’ll understand while I’m already feeling the pressure of the task sending signals of fear and doom straight down my spine..

The first installation is called ‘Yeah!!!, and consists of a Walkman and a speech bubble floating in mid air, with the Walkman positioned as if ‘speaking on the bubble’. The speech bubble says –funny enough- YEAH!!!

They’re both red, and the reason is because advertising researchers believe that the colour RED augments the number of sales of a product, or anyway it attract the attention of the consumer more than any other colour. What I’m trying to do with this project is building an association between the colour RED and the word YEAH, which is a word that can be found in millions of popular –and not- songs and sound composition in general.

I didn’t do an appropriate research on charts or an anthropological study of the effects of the word ‘Yeah’ on people, but it seems to appear in many number one songs. One thing that I felt personally is by casually listening to a track of which I don’t know the lyrics and when the ‘Yeah’ hook kicks in well..yeah!!!..I can sing-a-long for a bit as well!!! More research is needed on this..

Coming back to the actual installation, I might say is an audio-visual piece, as it works with both of the before-mentioned senses. The sonic aspect of the installation lay in a tape playing through stereo speakers from the red floating Walkman Cassette Player itself, and it is a composition based on cut-ups of ’yeahs’ from different songs from different genres of music. This is actually the part of the project that got me going a bit mad in the last two weeks. I worked on something that holds similarity –at least sonically and aesthetically- to ‘YEAH’ two years ago, and it was an installation called ‘Tapegrinder’ (you can find a video in older posts), but that was based on the interaction between audience and three cassette players, so the random element was wanted. Here I’m not sure it is wanted. A first version of the ‘YEAH’ piece had three cassette players on repeat instead of one playing three different compositions, but it could have ended in chaos as portable cassette players don’t have the word ‘synch’ in their vocabulary, so I went minimal: one walkman – zero walkmen wasn’t an option..

My struggle is still in the mixing process of all this cut-ups, as I’m trying to find a shape for the composition with which I’m aesthetically satisfied with: I guess the core problem is that I’ve never really explored skills such as time-stretching and cross-fading of multiple tracks (or better, I did it in sound for film pieces, but here I’m in front of a SERIOUSLY different tasks). So ‘YEAH!!!’, still got four days to ponder and cut and paste songs – but at least the foam core for the speech bubble has been glued and cut and painted (..mm..the damn thing wasn’t easy to cut as I thought, and I didn’t know about ‘knifes that heat themselves’, as a friend doing sculpture suggested it as the perfect tool the day after my cutting mayhem. So..mixed results but I’m happy with it).

Monday the 14^th will be the judge – or Armageddon I might say.

Ok, back to the second installation: working title ‘I CAN walk (in my corporate grave)’.

I found out that is not gonna be 100 per cent sure that I’ll have access to the big red container outside of the LCC building – and to make things even heavier is not sure 100 per cent if the container will be red at all as they’re planning to repaint it!!!

But I don’t despair; I always had a PlanB, which consists of having it on a smaller scale inside the school gallery. And anyway, the focal point of the project now is: where and how am I going to get thousands of red empty cans of coke? ..and the answer is..

Where people throw them away! Which is in the rubbish bin, usually situated not more of a mile away from the purchasing place and along the route of consumption of the fizzy product. So, even if I don’t really care, most of my friends pointed out that is not cool -and actually pretty gross- to constantly go through rubbish bins around London in search of my Red Corporate Grail, especially when I’m with them. Also is not proving effective, as like most people around this town I too have a job or other things to do during the day – there are special cases of people that actually go through the rubbish all the time, like our friend the rubbish collector and, of course, some homeless persons.

Solution? I bought my own bins (RED BINS) and I’ll install ‘em around town. After some research I came to the conclusion that the best locations for the bins is in Kebab and Chicken shops, especially the ones open 24 hours a day. The only thing I need is the permission from the owner or manager of the business to do it. Some thought I’m crazy, some just got scared, but most of them seemed happy to help me out – some even thought that I’m famous, and got really excited about me telling them about their premises been in the credits of the installation. Another obvious place is the school’s canteen, and one of the RED BINS should be in place by Monday – many thanks to the canteen’s manager Simon for supporting the cause.

This will be accompanied by some posters, of which you can see the work in progress in the pictures. Thanks to Nadine for designing this and the stencil for the bins: You’re the queen of Photoshop. I’m the lord of rubbish.

Signin’off..

CAN CAN!!!

So here is what I got in mind for my site specific installations due in May..

I’ll get back pretty soon with thoughts on a recent research on some peculiar objects called BUTTKICKERS!!!! which I'm planning to use for what follows..

As I've been focusing both my dissertation - and most of the compositions that I’ve created in the last two years - on popular culture and the recycle of sound material through sonic manipulation, I thought about having my final installation as a site-specific piece around the iconic image of the Coca-cola can. As source of inspiration I definitely have to cite Andy Warhol, especially the 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans piece, and Christian Marclay’s Telephone.

The installation I have in mind has at its core an environmental message, and it is a direct attack on the corporate world we live in.

The provisional title is: We CAN Walk (in our corporate graves)

It consists of two separate factors:

- Thousands of empty cans of Coke
- A composition played through loudspeakers (which would be a mix of Foley work on cans of Coke, Coke company Jingles, and probably an overall structure similar to Mozart's
Requiem). I need also to find out if such a mass of cans of Coke can be molecularly moved by subsonic infrasounds.

I considered health and safety because of the sharp edges of the used tin cans, and I thought about RED working suits, RED boots and RED gardening gloves.
I also thought of building some sonic Headphones – which are called CANS in popular English slang funny enough- with two cans at the two ends, but that could be another piece, maybe with the title "I CAN hear you!”
The piece would need some carpentry work that I can do with some friends, as I need to elevate the container floor, and then having it descending in a sea of empty cans of Coke - of course at a reasonable level (again) for health and safety reasons.
Regarding the composition techs specifics for diffusion, it would be stereo with a sub-woofer. So I'd only need an amp, two speakers + sub, a CD player.
I'll look through recycling companies to see what's the deal on getting such a big amount of cans, and also if I can manage to get the council to collect them at the end of the show for recycling purposes. I also thought about asking local Kebab shop to keep some plastic red rubbish containers  -which I will provide- to collect and separate the cans from the rest of the garbage (I’m pretty sure more than a million cans of coke are consumed in the London area each and everyday). I could do the same thing in the school building and offices workspaces.

I got a friend who's a lawyer that can enlighten me regarding the risks I could incur into by using the Coca-cola brand - Even if I’ve been told by LCC staff that it shouldn't be a problem because LCC is a private space.

The room will also get darker and darker as people go through - Think of Miroslaw Balka's installation at the Turbine Hall.

The perfect site for this piece would be the red container now standing outside of the school building. I’ve been in touch with the responsible of the site and I’m not waiting for everything to be green-lightened.

Signing off.

The Ants are much more important than Us..

I went to a lecture by Sound Artist Max Eastley today and it was quiet inspiring.

I was especially stricken by his installations that in David Toop’s words are ‘sound sculptures that are as engagingly beautiful as they are technologically simple’.

The one in the picture consists of blocks of ice with stones placed within the layers. As the ice melt a miked metal surface captures the sound, which is then diffused through loudspeakers.

Answering to a question in regard of the meaning of the use of the stones, he replied –and here I’m paraphrasing- that is a view of the world, where the stones represent an unexpected event: we hear the sounds of drops hitting the metal surface and suddenly one of the stones falls producing a different and louder sound.

It made me think about my own sound installations, and it kind of putted me off on the use of pre-recorded loops. It excites me more the possibility of using a natural occurring event in the simplest and economic way possible so..yeah! Thanx a lot for today’s lecture Mr. Max Eastley! I thought your Arc mono string instrument was great too. Cross fingers for airport custom controls.

I also felt really touched by your digression on global warming and the fact that humanity would probably need five more planets to learn how to use them. And yes, the Ants are absolutely much more important then us people for Earth’s ecosystem. Signing off.