CANCAN and the death of the Butt Kickers

So here we go. The installation happened, and I enjoyed the opening really much. All the works of my classmates was really interesting and the audience seemed to be engaged and to interact with the installations - when this was wanted by the artists. Unfortunately I pushed the tactile transducer a bit too much and..well..KABOOM..taking down the piece as of this moment because the rain got through the container and I don't want to die electrocuted in a metal container only a week after the end of my degree..here some pics of the thing for posterity. special thanks to Philip Holmes for making the main structure and to Acme Bars -Indo Pub- for sponsoring part of it.It seemed that the crowd enjoyed the piece in spite of all the technical problems. The composition track had different responses, with some people really getting into it and other despising it for his socio-political contents - while working on a mixer and various cable connections I overheard some students calling the piece 'pretentious' and saying that my business cards are really good for making 'roaches'- which it is probably true, but I stopped smoking pot a long time ago (why?)..mm..anyway enjoy the pics..signing off..

The Red Coca Cola Cans Only Bins Legacy..

As I pretty much reached the amount of red coke cans that I needed for the ‘CANCAN’ installation, I think it is now time to draw conclusion on how the three red bins that I installed around London worked out in the end.

RED BIN 1 – installed at HFC Halal Fried Chicken Shop, Whitechapel: didn’t go well at all. Loads of chicken bones and residues of half eaten burgers and few cans, and the owner threw the bin in the street after a week (luckily I managed to recover it).

RED BIN 2 – installed at  PFC2 Perfect Fried Chicken Shop, Whitechapel: this was excellent!!! For some reasons the owner convinced the customers to use it only for cans – not only red of course, but this is the place from which I collected most of them. It worked so well that the owner decided to start recycling, and as a gift I left him the bin. Thanks Abdul. You’re a good man.

RED BIN 3 – LCC Canteen, Elephant and Castle. This was actually the worst. Even with the red signs all around the college student just couldn’t get it – or they couldn’t give a damn about it, or simply they can’t read, they’re just pretending.

I was gonna take it away, but Simon –the manager- asked me to keep it there, as he’s also into recycling and he exclaimed: they MUST learn to use it!

So this is the results, and the unexpected legacy that this bin created.

I’m a pessimist, and I don’t think recycling will save the world, but it doesn’t take much effort to throw something in the left hand side bin instead that in the right hand side one.

A big thanks to all the people and friends that collected empty cans for me, especially Drew and Giovanna. Great score. Some more cans might come from outside London, but not sure if they’ll make it on time. Signing off..

CANCAN in Tasmania!!!

It’s been a while since the last post, but catastrophe struck!!! Two of the main technical things I needed for my sound installations got blocked by custom in..Tasmania! It took a while to get through all the papers (and the damn fine) but now they arrived. The two thingies in question is a pair of Aura Pro tactile transducers - also known as ‘butt-kickers’ or ‘bass shakers’(I put a pack of cigarette next to them so you got an idea of the dimensions).

They’re fundamental for my project as from my research seems like the perfect one to shake the mountain of red coke cans. Oh yeah! I changed the name of the project from “You CAN walk (in your corporate grave)” to “CANCAN” for two reasons: first I like the new one more anyway, and second because for health and safety reasons you CAN’T actually walk (on my deathly sound-installation-grave).

I’m in contact with a carpenter, and next week we’ll try the Transducers on different kinds of wood – and maybe metal as well. The transducer will be excited by infrasounds coming from an amplifier. These infrasounds will be part of my final composition for the piece, which is a cut-up of different coca-cola adverts and some speeches from various U.S. presidents. The sound of the coke cans rattle should be then amplified using some contact mics(the red/black snake-looking things you see in the picture). here is where it gets tricky, as I’m not aware as yet of the sound resulting. I’ll try to manipulate it using some guitar pedals fx. But that’s all for now. Time is running faster than a tsunami wave but I’ll keep surfing on my see of coke cans. Signing off..

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..

YEAH!!!

So YEAH!!! I gave the last touch and sort out bits and bops and pops and some spray can’s retouches and now I’m sitting in front of YEAH!!! at LCC’s media dept atrium. Pretty happy with it and setting it up was easier than I thought – got a moment of panic as the red speaker wasn’t really loud but it came out to be a faulty XLR cable.

It got a really good reception from the students passing by - some dancing and loads of pics and videos taken.

An MA student in photography took LOADS of pictures actually (both digital and film), and she said she’ll send me some prints – which is $%^&%* AMAZING!!!

It is a coincidence that today is Valentine’s Day, and I guess part of the audience might think it is linked to the occasion – should have made an heart-shaped speech bubble..

I already wrote about the piece, but I feel I need to say something more about the tape cassette itself. What I came up with is two different compositions –one using pure cut-ups from songs and the other manipulating the tracks with MAX/MSP patches and analog pedal effects-. I also decided to give lots of  ‘silence’ between the tracks, so that I could surprise the audience with some sudden (and really short) bursts of ‘yeahs’.

Oh!!! Last thing!! I used the cassette’s case to hold some biz cards..last minute idea. I love those rare moments..

ps for some reason the walkman is keen on grabbing the signal from the mobile phones around pretty LOUD!!! I'm really enjoying it actually!!!

ok..or better..YEAH!!!..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.

..embers..

I read recently a dissertation from Paul O'Brien, a student that finished the BA Sound Arts course last year. I got to say that apart for being a well organized and thoughtful thesis, it was particularly pleasant to read and, without wanting to sound too lame or sentimental..well..here we go..yes..TOUCHING. Reading this brought me to his website Hearing Beckett, where I found more information on his work. What really got to me was how all his work through the course of his last year at school results so homogeneous and..here we go again..'clean'. 

'Solution Of Continuity' was his Final Major Project for his degree.

 It is an installation that does not use any sound..only dust as he argues. It kind of relates with certain thoughts on my dissertation, in particular the recorded voice of someone dead. And the value that piece of tape or vinyl or data on a hard disk can gain with time -commercial value or spiritual or sentimental or..who knows.. 

I know it doesn't make sense to you reader now but I'll try to make it more clear as soon is clearer to me but yeah! sound installations with no sounds! need to do some research on that! I leave you with some words from Mr O'Brien himself. I'm sure it'll make more sense.

"Solution of continuity is a silent sculptural work inspired by Beckett’s stage play, ‘That Time’. ‘Solution of continuity’ is a medical term defined as, ‘A division of bones or of soft parts that are normally continuous’. Beckett harnesses the term in his stage directions for the play to describe the constant flow of words from three ‘moments of the same voice’, proceeding ‘without solution of continuity’. This idea is turned on its head in the piece wherein the two ‘normally continuous’ spools are literally separated, thus there is ‘not a sound’, ‘nothing only dust’."

BA3 Show 2010 - Paul O'Brien - Solution of Continuity from Sound Arts & Design @ LCC on Vimeo.

Publish Post

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.