Saturday, February 3, 2018

Sound Strand

Throughout last semester, we were all separated into smaller groups to undertake a strand - ranging from traditional oil portraiture, to digital programming, filmmaking and drawing from film, and my strand, Sound.
I have never, nor have ever intended to work with sound as an art medium so was obviously apprehensive and pretty disheartened with my strand. I found the recording or everyday noises mundane and the programming (on platforms such as Audacity, and Pure Data) confusing and uninspiring.
However, as we were expected to present a piece in the Strand Exhibition, I undertook the challenge and tried to adapt the medium to my interests.
I found the spoken word a lot more interesting to listen to than obscure noises, and recorded a random conversation I had with a course mate observing a children's school trip in our University's art gallery and reminiscing.
I overlaid three of the same conversation on top of each other, leaving one as it was, playing one backwards and the final one I sped up 2x. The resulting sound had been transformed from the mature, if fairly dull conversation of two adults into the chaos ruckus of the children's excitement on the school trip, linking the two.
I knew I wanted the sound to emanate from some sculptures, and drawing on some papier mache experiments I did earlier (see two posts previous) I worked abstractly from memory of me and Lex hunched over, chatting. I thought the papier mache medium also perfectly encapsulated the nostalgia associated with primary school.
See below for finished product


the Marshall mini-amps which were encased in the sculpture