Six Captives
Ruthin Gaol, August 2010
60Hz sinewaves are fed continuously through 6 upturned speaker cones on the floor of Cell #9 in Ruthin Gaol. A dismembered Lego head is placed into each cone; the vibration of the cone causes the heads to move around indefinitely in a chaotic, unpredictable way. Their simple, unceasing smiles are in stark contrast to the purgatory they must endure.
The piece as explained to my niece and nephew (aged 6 and 9):
When people are in prison, they’re trapped in their little cells and they can move around a bit but they can’t escape. They’re confined within the walls, and controlled by the prison guards. But they still have some freedoms and choices – freedom to think and decide what to talk about and what to read and what to do within the cell or within the prison work system. And even though it’s possible to predict some things about their lives (like how long they’re there for, what times they eat dinner etc), other things are impossible to know in advance. I wanted to do a piece that had similar features – a conflict between freedom and confinement and a conflict between predictability and unpredictability.
Now – I don’t know whether you’d seen your dad’s amp when he’s playing guitar, but when you play really low notes through a loudspeaker, in order to make the sound, the loudspeaker has to move backwards and forwards through the air so that you can actually see it moving, and if you touch the paper in the middle you’ll really feel it wobbling. High pitched sounds don’t do this, because the movement is too fast to see and too small to be felt. But low pitched sounds cause some serious wobble. This is where the fun starts.
Normally, speakers face sideways so that you can hear them properly when you’re standing in a room, but if you lay them down on the floor so that they’re pointing straight up, you basically have a mini trampoline. If you play a really low pitched note through a speaker on its back, and put a small object like a ping pong ball or a pea into the hollow, the movement of the paper cone will cause the thing in the cone to bobble around forever (or until the sound stops). If you have the volume too loud, and the speaker is moving too much, the thing will jump straight out, so you set the volume so that the thing jumps around but not too much. The thing is now trapped! It moves around inside the loudspeaker, but it can’t ever escape – it’s a prisoner, free to bobble around wherever it likes inside the cone, but it can’t get out. And even though the movement of the cone is really really simple (the paper is just moving up and down), it’s not physically possible to predict exactly where the thing will bounce to next. So at any given moment, even if you had a very powerful computer, you wouldn’t be able to tell where the thing will go next, or where it’s just come from. If you watch the bobbling, it seems totally random, and there are some quite difficult and complicated maths, physics and philosophies going on (quantum mechanics, nomological determinism etc). So the small objects in the speaker are prisoners, and the speaker is the prison.
What I wanted to do was put 6 loudspeakers in a small prison cell, run a really low pitched sound through them all, put small objects into the loudspeakers and then leave them to run all day long. As well as being able to watch the things all bobble around, they’re all making a noise when they bobble – so with six of these going on at the same time you get this chaotic sound all around you, lots of very busy bobbling noises. Plus, if you get close to the speakers you can hear the low drone in the background (human ears don’t pick up very low frequencies very well).
The only question I had left to answer was what to put into the loudspeakers as bobblers. I wanted a strong concept, so didn’t want to just put anything in there without there being a reason. So although things like uncooked rice, peppercorns, ping pong balls etc would have been okay, I wanted something with more meaning. And then suddenly I thought about Owen and I had the idea! Lego heads! Lego heads would be perfect because they’re the right size and weight to bobble, and it’s easier to see them as prisoners, which is what the piece was about. What makes them even more perfect is that the Lego heads I have are the original old ones with very simple smiling faces. And so there’s a dark and slightly twisted humour about having these tortured prisoners looking so happy as they bounce around – a happiness in total contrast to their situation. The end result – something fun to look at and listen to but that can also be thought of in a deeper and more philosophical way.
Windgate II
Ruthin Craft Centre, August 2010
An attempt to turn the huge Craft Centre entrance gate into a wind-powered musical instrument.
5 toy windmills are taped to the metal railings along with a series of ‘knockers’ – ping pong, bouncy rubber and polystyrene balls attached to strings. The knockers are positioned such that gusts of wind cause them to be blown away from the gate, returning to strike the gate’s vertical supports when the gust fades. 4 piezoelectric contact mics and 2 unidirectional field mics are also attached to the railings, and these are fed to a 16 track mixing desk and out to 2 sets of headphones, left on a nearby table and chairs. The windmills cause the gate to resonate, the knockers provide arrhythmic percussive events of varying timbres, and the mics pick up all these internal and external hums, drones, bongs and squeaks, creating a non-repeating and self-playing amplified instrument. Did I get a recording of this happening? No. Why not? Because I’m an idiot.
The Stool of Ease Remote Surveillance Unit
Nantclwyd y Dre, Ruthin, August 2010
Two sensitive piezoelectric contact mics are attached to two creaky floorboards in a 15th century house. The cables are then fed off into a small Jacobean en-suite and end in two sets of headphones positioned on old wooden chairs either side of the ‘stool of ease’ (the en-suite’s marvellously named commode). Audience members are invited to hide in the en-suite and listen to the resulting amplified other-worldly creaks, squeaks, cracks and hisses coming from the house. Because they can’t see the location of the microphones, they don’t know the source of the sounds they’re hearing, whether they’re live, caused by other real people wandering around the house, spirits, or simply the house itself.
All That Converges Must Rise
Ruthin Craft Centre, August 2010
A 12 minute video loop shown in a small dark cupboard. An underground train speeds through an anonymous series of tunnels but never reaches its destination. Audio is of a slowly undulating drone/roar.
This piece is all about two things:
1. setting up expectation and then denying a resolution, leaving the expectation unfulfilled
2. inducing exhilaration through intense focus and claustrophobia
The title is a play on the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and has nothing whatsoever to do with either Flannery O’Connor or The Hafler Trio.
Windgate
Rowen, Conwy, September 2009
Created during the Locator 20 residency in Rowen, led by Simon Whitehead.
The landscape around and above Rowen is old and vast. Although it has been shaped by human activity, this shaping is superficial. It remains, ultimately, oblivious to our presence. It has been here long before we arrived and will still be here long after we are gone.
It therefore seemed arrogant and intrusive to create a piece in the landscape that required significant input from me. I felt it much more appropriate to use largely what was already available – topology, objects found on the hillside and weather.
The windmills act as a power source, harnessing the ever-present wind to activate percussive events on the iron gate, but they also recall both the nearby seaside and the monstrous/beautiful wind turbines at Moel Maelogan, visible across the valley. Two microphones are fixed to the gate in order to amplify the deep and complex resonances within the gate structure that are induced by the windmills and objects. The audience get to hear both versions simultaneously – the initial and direct sound of sheep bone on iron, of rusted sheet on rusted strut, squeak and judder of each windmill’s rotation – and the richer, resonant, indirect thuds, scrapes and drones fed through the speakers.
Here’s the unamplified version, a recording of just the direct sound from the gate before the speakers were switched on:
Steffan Jones-Hughes said that this piece was ‘visually…relatively weak’, but thankfully he also goes on to say that ‘It becomes mesmeric and contemplative.’
Parallel Wales
The LAB, San Francisco, October-November 2008. With Owen Martell
An audio-visual component of the greater Parallel Wales project. Images of towns and cities in the north-eastern United States with Welsh place-names are projected along with field recordings of their Welsh counterparts. A complex and multi-levelled work, this could just as easily be summarised as an investigation into audio-visual disconnect and disruption of sensory expectation as it could an exploration of shared but distant cultural histories, or the strange psychological effects of geographical nomenclature.
See two of the pieces in the comfort of your own Welsh town over at Owen’s site.
A Day In The Life of a Welsh Gallery
The LAB, San Francisco, October-November 2008. With Owen Martell
Day-to-day activity transposed across the Atlantic: a six hour field recording of the exhibition space at Galeri Caernarfon played back at low levels over the in-house PA system in the foyer of the LAB Gallery, San Francisco. Will Californian art lovers be disorientated by disembodied Welsh footsteps, or strange murmurings in a language they can’t place? Will the footsteps be conspicuous by their unCalifornianness? Will foyer-dwellers be too hip to even notice?
The Mabinogi of Math
Maentwrog, Gwynedd, June 2008
Audio installation as part of a woodland storytelling trail. Pryderi has just declared war against Gwynedd as a result of being tricked into giving away all his pigs. The audience descend steeply downhill through tree cover and heavy undergrowth, surrounded by bloody conflict, death, arrows, fire and lots of stabbing.
Ysbrydnos
Coed Gwydir, Llanrwst, October 2007. With Ceri Rimmer
Evening falls. Audience members progress through the pitch black forest labyrinth in pairs, guided by instinct and starlight. At the darkest point, deep in the labyrinth’s heart, where no light can penetrate, a silent man dressed in black blocks the way. He offers his hand, and leads the guests slowly into the blackness, eventually towards a small glowing red ball. They stop. The man produces an umbrella, which he hands to the guests. As they take the umbrella, it begins to rain – gentle at first, getting stronger, clearly audible all around, but none of it falling on the umbrella. Strange insects are heard in the darkness, windchimes, muffled voices just out of range. Then, out of the darkness, a huge cocoon appears, glowing blue – it is made entirely of umbrellas. As deep, plate-tectonic drones circle the onlookers, the cocoon beings to rotate, and soon births a young dancer, who emerges into the night. An exploratory, ritual dance follows, and when the dancer notices the observers, she stops, takes them by the hand and leads them into the cocoon. Once more, the cocoon rotates, slowly at first and then faster, and then slowly again, disgorging its inhabitants in the opposite direction from which they entered. They continue down the dark forest path towards the Scientist’s hut. The silent man returns to the dark place entrance to greet the next guests.
I will eventually put the audio up here, but it’s really not the same without me having loomed terrifyingly out of the darkness and given you an umbrella first.