Shady Lane Productions 2006

by Phil Collins

Turner Prize 2006 exhibition at Tate Britain

Phil Collins’s art investigates our ambivalent relationship with the camera as both an instrument of attraction and manipulation, of revelation and shame. He often operates within forms of low-budget television and reportage-style documentary to address the discrepancy between reality and its representations. In his projects, Collins creates unpredictable situations and his irreverent and intimate engagement with his subjects – a process he describes as ‘a cycle of no redemption’ – is as important for his practice as the final presentation in the gallery.

Sonorous City - London Soundscape Project

Sonorous City is an immersive surround-sound installation exploring the relationship between the soundscape and our perception of the urban environment. A series of soundwalks stemming from the River Thames form the basis of the work, which reveals an experience of London lead by the ear.



Sonorous City is the result of a 2 year (part-time) MA research project in Digital Arts.

Wet Sounds UK Tour 2011

Wet Sounds is an underwater sound art gallery - a deep listening experience
Touring swimming pools, it presents listening sessions to a floating and diving audience in the water. The participants are fully immersed in sound. Free to move weightlessly in the sound space. Read Press Release...

I found the experience to be quite extraordinary, as you were able to navigate 'hot spots' of sound underwater where I imagine, due to the shape of the swimming pool and different depths of water, the sound would sound much louder and all encompassing. Seeing as the water actually enters your ear and is in direct contact with your ear drum the sensation is that you are hearing the sounds in much the same way as when you might speak for example, therefore it is quite a bizzare experience when there are vocals played through the speakers, which actually feel like they are much closer.

Of course this is not the first time where a swimming pool has been used as means by which to exhibit sound works. Max Neuhaus was experimenting with this idea as early as 1971, in his series water whistle which is described by the artist here:

"The sound sources were hydraulic: a network of hoses fed water through a configuration of whistle-like devices, each enclosed in a reflector. The water pressure in the hoses caused them to flex constantly, reorienting each sound source independently. This formed a shifting sound texture which varied according to the listener's position in the pool. "

Projection of underwater shape with sound source locations,
Water Whistle XVII, 1983
Ink and colored pencil on paper, 96 x 96 cm

Listeners at Water Whistle III, St. Paul YMCA, 1972

DYNASTY

1 exhibition, 2 venues, 40 artists, 80 projects: «Dynasty» is the outcome of an innovative joint venture involving the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC and the Palais de Tokyo.

Robin Meier et Ali Momeni

Robin Meier and Ali Momeni both apply the rules of music composition to the confines of art and science. Their collaboration focuses particularly on the interactions between man and the machine. Even though their work integrates high-tech procedures, it resonates nevertheless with the purest traditions of the arts. Trained as a musician, Robin Meier studied composition in Switzerland and electroacoustics at the National Conservatory in the Region of Nice. Since 2004, he has pursued a degree in cognitive philosophy at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). Ali Momeni is, as he holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota.
Robin Meier was born in 1980. Lives and works in Paris. Ali Momeni was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1975. Lives and works in Minneapolis, USA.


For Dynasty Robin Meier's and Ali Momeni's work at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC combines electromagnetic waves with astrological rituals, echoing Raoul Dufy’s La Fée Electricité [The Electricity Fairy], which showed the impact of a growing urban electrical distribution on society. At the Palais de Tokyo, Meier and Momeni propose Truce: Strategies for Post-Apocalyptic Computation, an original reading of the works of Gabrielle Gibson and Ian Russel. These scientists from Greenwich University discovered a humming modulation in mosquitoes during copulation. The artists propose here to regulate this behavior by inviting three live insects to reinterpret a traditional Indian song.

Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller

Pandemonium (2005)

Materials: robotic beaters hitting lights, pipes, cupboards, beds and steel drums controlled by midi.

Installation 2005-7 Eastern State Pennitentiary Museum, curated by Julie Courtney

Tip tap tip tap. Is that the sound of dripping or is it someone in a cell tapping a code on the wall? Now there are many more tapping sounds. Far and near. Loud and soft. Now someone is banging on a pipe, now a cupboard. Now the hall is filled with a cacophony of beats, working their way back and forth, a PANDEMONIUM of percussion.

Using the existing elements in the prison cells Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have made the entire Cellblock Seven into a giant musical instrument, producing a percussive site work. This instrument, controlled by a computer and midi system, is made up of one hundred and twenty separate beaters hitting disparate xobjects such as toilet bowls, light fixtures and bedside tables found within the prison cells. The composition begins subtly as if two prisoners are trying to communicate and then moves through an abstract soundscape and lively dance beats until it reaches a riot-like crescendo.

The massive Eastern State Penitentiary was once the most famous and expensive prison in the world. Its gothic, castle-like towers stood as a grim warning to lawbreakers in the young United States. This was the world’s first true “penitentiary,” a prison intended to inspire profound regret – or penitence—in the hearts of criminals. The influential design featured cellblocks extending like the spokes of a wheel; each inmate lived in solitary confinement in a vaulted sky-lit cell. The prison itself had running water and central heat before the White House, and once held many of America’s most notorious criminals, including bank robber “Slick Willie” Sutton and Al Capone.

Eastern State closed in 1971. The prison stands today in ruin, a haunting world of crumbling cellblocks and a place of surprising beauty. Cardiff and Miller present Pandemonium in Cell Block Seven, a massive, cathedral-like, two-story wing completed in 1836. It has never been open to the public, and has been stabilized especially for this exhibition. The installation will open to the public on May 12, 2005 and will remain on view through November as well as in 2006.

Playing the Corridor

Group show at 19 West Princess St. 12th February 2010

A friend asked if I wanted to do some sort of sound installation in their flat so I jumped at the oppurtunity as they didn't seem that boethered if I drilled a few holes in the ceiling.


The result was a piece of clothes line attached to the ceiling via a 90 degrees bracket and then pulled taught by turning a wheel inside of the box, attached to the floor by hinges. Inside the box I had attached a contact microphone which picked up the sound, when the line was plucked, which was then amplified through a loudspeaker. The box was on hinges with a handle to tilt back and forth, to increase the tension in the line so as to get some nice bendy sounds.


Here is a brief video where I demonstrate how to play the corridor

Encountering ‘The Body’ of Installation Art within Spinoza’s Ethics.

“Reality is inexhaustible, and there must be infinite ways in which it can be thought of.” (Stuart Hampshire, Introduction to Ethics)

To engage with a work of art is traditionally a primarily optical experience, one that necessitates the act of ‘looking’ at an object or image. What happens when we go beyond the purely visual, when art invites a physical engagement and we, as viewer, experience the work as participant, rather than spectator? What affects are activated by encountering a work which communicates through audio, visual and kinaesthetic means? How does installation attempt to engage participants? These concepts are evident in contemporary practice, as well documented by Nicolas Bourriaud in his text Relational Aesthetics , yet it is also worth revisiting the historical development of engaged installational practice.
(Read more...)

Miroslaw Balka at Tate Modern (12.01.10)

Michael Landy - Break Down (2001)

A recurring theme in most of books and films mentioned earlier is how objects which are prone to being nostalgic and therefore provoke memories and emotions, are removed from society to be left with a very bland environment where people walk around mindlessly, reducing procrastination and increasing the efficiency of the economy.

Break Down involved Michael Landy documenting every item in his possession and then proceeding to destroy them all - a comment on contemporary consumer capitalism. In this case however, it has been his own personal decision and is similar to the lifestyle that a Buddhist monk might live.



Having performed such a theatrical spectacle one would wonder how Landy's next work would respond to this rather traumatic event in his life. His answer was to go back to appreciating very tiny plants, in this case weeds which are completely overlooked on a daily basis. However, his incredibly detailed etchings reveal how fantastically intricate they can be and for him I think the process was very therapeutic.


I think weeds are particularly interesting as they seem so fragile however they manage to grow pretty much everywhere, from the cracks in a wall to the pavement and can exist without very much sustenance.