The Room Above The Piano Room
Produced during the Countdown Grabowsee residency, The Room Above The Piano Room is an audiovisual playground for adults: an installation that reacts to changes in its surroundings, and within itself.
Through an array of digital and analog sensors, it detects evolutions in atmospheric conditions, the presence of an audience, interferences from electronic devices, and alters its audiovisual output accordingly, with variable delay and refresh rate. These alterations in turn change the local environment enough to be picked up by the machine, effectively creating a feedback loop at the scale of a room. Its behaviour is coordinated by a laptop running a processing sketch with multiple inputs and outputs, and the video stream comes from a second laptop filming the screen of the first, thereby inviting visual artefacts due to the loss of resolution, camera autofocus, and light interferences.
List of modules in the room above the piano room:
device for seeing through walls — webcam facing outwards
device for self-reflection — webcam facing inwards
device for listening to phones — electromagnetic pick-up, steel rod, brick
device for making fingers digital — electromagnetic pick-up, copper rod, stand
device for building a rhythm — metal ring, electromagnetic pick-up, lightbulb
device for hearing feet — cymbal, contact microphones
device for hearing the floor creak — metal suitcase, contact microphones
device for increasing luminosity — lamp structure, lightbulb
device for staring into the void — suitcase, disconnected microphones
3am to 3am
A single hour, out of time: from 3am to 3am, waiting for the clocks to reset. One hour during which audience and artists, without a word, trade place: a collection of instruments are connected to a 16-channel system linking sounds to different areas of the three-floored space. One plays, together with someone one cannot see, a music that will echo elsewhere. Speaking is discouraged, and smoke fills every corner of the space, making any communication other than musical or tactile difficult.
SONG FOR THE BOILER
In the basement of an old boiler house, three ice cubes hang in precarious positions, slowly melting above three amplified cymbals. As drops hit the brass in random sequences, each triggers a new signal and triggers an acoustic feedback loop that will settle over time. At rare occasions a chunk of ice falls, launching a chain reaction that will sound for several minutes. This generative and randomised symphony to uncontrollable patterns was conceived to last 48 hours with the local temperature conditions. It was still going when the event ended.
ROCK PAPER SCISSORS SOUND TIME
The exhibition 'Rock Paper Scissors Sound Time' explores what might remain of our activities in a distant future. Sharing the space with fake fossiles of synthetic objects were two sound pieces.
'Goutte-à-goutte' is a sculpture made of several custom-made glass objects hanging with fishing line, each of them so light that the mere surface tension from water dripping down the line is enough to move them up, emitting a faint sound. And once again, when water enters the glass tubes, smaller in diameter than the drops themselves. Visitors are invited to interact with the installation by adding ink to the water, changing the end result in ways that can't ever be anticipated.
'5,8,12 & the Soundtrack of Randomness', calls the audience's attention towards three blocks of concrete designed to be as mathematically unrelated as possible, while still retaining a coherent look. A sound recording of the production process, half-improvised and performed using non-verbal communication only, is played from several invisible sources.