The Trust made its latest award to Dan Knight in 2010. It takes us into a new area for the Trust – a mixture of craft and performance. This is partly what attracted us to Dan’s proposal. Dan wanted to build a bottle-organ and give a public charity performance with a newly commissioned piece. What also attracted us were the proposal’s simplicity, modesty and clarity of purpose. Dan describes his work as
“…. sculpture that transforms energy to create movement, sound and light and my work can often be manipulated by a viewer. I am also interested in waste and detritus and giving things a new life.”
He built his first organ 11 years ago and experimented with different versions then
“I had the idea to make a big version that has every note that can be got from a bottle and I had the vision to make it like a small room that you can go inside and be surrounded by the sound.”
This installation at the Barbican consisted of around 30 Zebra Finches flying around a curved room with guitars and cymbals on stands plugged in to speakers. They managed to create some fantastic sounds as they landed on the guitar strings or attempted to make a nest by wedging grass between them.
Bringing animals into the gallery space is something that Mircea Cantor has also experimented with quite a few times. In 'Deeparture' a deer and a wolf are left alone in a room of a gallery and the work is a film which shows how they react to one another, the deer being very on edge and the wolf behaving very nonchalant.
I wanted to go to the Kelvingrove museum to see if there might be anything concerning antiquated forms of communication.
I didn't manage to find much on the matter however there was one thing which caught my attention which was the ventilation grills which at one point looked as though they were presented as a frame in themselves.
There was one which was emitting a particularly loud, high-pitched noise which sounded like it was coming from a massive heating room hidden somewhere in the basement of the building. I was quite interested in the idea of sounds being transported around the building in this manner, much like servants would be called for in a large Victorian house via bells.
Hunterian Museum - Lord Kelvin permanent exhibition
Lord Kelvin was born William Thomson in Belfast on 26th June 1824 and was the fourth child of James and Margaret Thomson. After the death of his mother, William along with the rest of the family moved to Glasgow where his father took up the Chair of Mathematics at the University. William entered the University of Glasgow at just 6 years of age, officially matriculating at age 10. In 1841, at the age of 17 he entered Cambridge, graduating there four years later before returning in 1846 to take up the Chair of Natural Philosophy (what we now call physics) at the University of Glasgow.
In the mid 1850s and for the next decade he became increasingly involved in the cable laying projects that were to allow, for the first time, Britain to communicate instantly with the other side of the Atlantic. By1866 his skills as a mathematician, applied physicist and engineer had led the Atlantic cable project to successful completion earning him a Knighthood.
This fantastic display was truly engaging and included pieces such as a a wine glass placed inside a perspex box, a certain pitch was then played through a bass amp which would cause the glass to resonate and wobble.
Some of the scientific apparatus were just fantastic items in themselves but I particulary liked a pair of brass parabolic mirrors with a description of an experiement carried out by Jean Antoine Nollet:
" I am persuaded that cokes act mostly by radiation like that of the sun. There is a pretty experiment in Nollets Lecons de Physique: he set two mirrors, (made of pasteboard gilt), parallel to one another, and face to face, in the opposite sides of a room: in the focus of one, a bit of charcoal, and in that of the other, a little gunpowder he blew upon the charcoal to brighten it, and the gunpowder took fire."
These seemed to me very similar to the sound mirrors which I had looked at earlier on. On further investigation I found this website which seemed to bring together these two apparatus. (follow the link here)
