Full title:
An Interaction of Ideas Developing from an Installation of Sound and Computer Images (1994)
Collaborative installation with Tom Schmitt
Centre Gallery, Miami-Dade Community College, Wolfson Campus
August 1994
Tom Schmitt and I began by surveying obsolete audiovisual equipment stored in closets at Miami-Dade Community College’s Wolfson Campus. We brought whatever appeared useful into the Centre Gallery and allowed the installation to develop through an interaction among our ideas, materials, technologies, and ways of working.
My task was to determine which devices could be controlled through a MIDI lighting board I had used in earlier installations, beginning with R con R. Two power packs allowed the computer to address eight electrical circuits independently. Some devices were choreographed through MIDI sequences; others played recorded material of different durations. Their relationships continually shifted without settling into a single sequence or narrative.
Tom created the audiovisual material transmitted through U-matic video players, old television monitors, and a projector whose image covered a large wall. Fragments from an interview I recorded with Tom appeared within some of the videos as subtitles. Portions of the interview were also heard through a small number of bare loudspeakers suspended from the ceiling using lighting hardware found in the gallery.
The remaining sounds were produced acoustically through electrical action. For one element, I dismantled doorbell mechanisms and replaced their metal bars with short, hollow pieces of bamboo. Distributed around the gallery and activated electromechanically by the computer, they produced only a few notes at irregular moments.
Tom and I arranged the equipment throughout the gallery and hung some devices directly on the walls. Rather than conceal their infrastructure, we used the audio, video, control, and electrical cables to draw shapes across the space. The resulting environment had something of the appearance of a looted electronics store or pawnshop—an accumulation of aging machines momentarily given another purpose.
One jointly improvised gesture involved drilling a small hole at eye level through a wall that concealed a window. The opening brought a fragment of daylight and the outside world into the darkened gallery. Elsewhere, a found pendulum-like device moved silently, resembling a metronome while keeping time to nothing.
The installation had no definitive beginning or ending. Visitors could enter at any point among its changing cycles of images, voices, bamboo notes, moving mechanisms, light, and exposed machinery. They were also invited to observe its construction, and we continued adding, replacing, and repositioning elements during the exhibition. The work remained less a finished arrangement than an active situation in which its parts—and the two of us—continued to affect one another.
THE INVITATION
The invitation incorporated part of Enclosures, a sound poem I wrote in 1994. Although the poem was not part of the installation’s audiovisual material, I later used portions of it in a vocal work written for Joan La Barbara and dedicated the poem to Alison Knowles.
IMAGES FROM THE INSTALLATION
REVIEW
