dusted and thoughts on titles

butterflies are thoughts is in place, rigged up and ready for anyone to run their nervous system in front of it.

the sound coming from the pipes is super quiet, with the occasional burst of water, dripping or a bang. while all 4 pipes are miked, only 2 make any discernible noise through the speakers. i quite like the subtlety as it speaks to a more hidden infrastructure under the facade. 

the title of this work is something a little bit different than the titles i normally use. often my titles are simply descriptions of the work, eg - network, tap, charging etc. Although there are variances and there never really is any hard and fast rule about naming my work. i think it was mattise that said a title can be like another colour for the artwork. 

my work is becoming more and more refined in its exploration of system. for this work, there is an assemblage of elements that function together as a system. several of my works have been like this, sometimes kinetically so. the implication, hopefully, in this work is that technology is investigating its own material matter. the speaker lamps monitor the water/gas/air flow of the pipes and use this information to 'interrogate' a cobblestone made of melbourne bluestone.

in this way, the infrastructure of our cultural creations engage with the natural elements that make them up and ultimately generate them. so, the title really is just a reference to the way in which one thing can translate as another thing in a different context. it is designed to elicit a very direct connection to nature, perhaps even sentimentally so, as well as intellectual concepts. almost as if to say, 'pretty nature is like an idea'. or that, more spefically, something from nature might be a perfect metaphor for something we humans can invent in our heads.

install

today was all about getting all the materials into place, testing all the wires, the microphones and the amps, the lights and all the amount of powerboards and extension cables needed.

setting up the first speaker-lamp;

connecting the contact mic, the power, and the speaker to the amp

setting the component elements into place

one of the necessary environmental conditions to consider is the lighting. often something easily overlooked. most times, galleries are very well lit, sometimes with track lighting or spots. for this installation i wanted the lighting to be a bit dramatic, a bit like a fractured infrastructure, as if the lights have either not yet been put into their place, or had been taking away from where they were meant to be.

 sitting the bluestone cobblestone on fluoro lights

placing the lights on the speaker-lamps 

seemed to elicit the best effect in the space

west wing invite

BUS @ WEST WING: Commodity/Fetishism

Curated by BUS Projects, 

featuring Kat Clarke, Maggie Brown, Chantal Fraser and Ann Fuata, 

Andrew Goodman, Kirsten McIver, Drew Pettifer and Kent Wilson.

20.01.11 – 30.01.11

Opening: Thursday 20 January, 6-8pm

This exhibition will form part of BUS Projects’ off site series of explorations into the nature of spatial artistic practices. Melbourne Central provides an ideal site in which to frame and mediate the interdependence of spatial practice with the concept of site-specificity. The works in this exhibition will be anchored in the site and its surroundings, critically reproducing the conditions of their spectacle context – consumption, obsolescence, nostalgia and longing – as a strategy to forestall their own displacement into commodities.

____________________________________________________

If you would like to donate to West Space we have Deductible Gift Recipient Status (DGR) for tax purposes.

West Space
1st Floor, 15-19 Anthony Street
Melbourne Vic 3000, Australia
www.westspace.org.au
info@westspace.org.au
ph 03 9328 8712

For further inquiries or media quality images please contact Melody Ellis or Phip Murray at the gallery on
Ph: 03 9328 8712 or email: info@westspace.org.au

butterflies are thoughts

all the bits and pieces of the artwork, like the component elements of a mini-system, are all constructed, soldered, drilled, tied and taped.

all four speaker-lamps built:

starting to look a lot like a system now

once constructed i needed to tested out how the lamps are going to look when i set them out as an apparent grouping of behaving objects.

first i set one up and just looked at it, to get a sense of its feeling, or effect/affect.

of course, there's a particularly anthropomorphic element, 
not least thanks to a particular digital animation

but then once they are grouped, another dynamic comes into play. a structural, systematic, amplification of the repeated behaviour, however that 'behaviour' may be implied to any given viewer.

   

 starting with 2 speaker-lamps 

(the log here will actually be a large bluestone cobblestone)

 

a third speaker-lamp, increasing the sense of implied power and implied network

introducing the slightly different speaker-lamp,

the one directed at the cobblestone protruding from the wall of the gallery

all four speaker-lamps, 
all mounted on structural pine (another infrastructural material reference)

the last image is taken from down lower to try and describe the feeling of intimidation that i feel like i'm getting from these objects that seem somehow to be with some sort of agency. the brick in the middle has replaced the log so i could get a better feel for the materiality of a rock.

here's hoping that there is a decent sound coming from the contact microphones on the pipes. even if not, i think the sculptural form of the work still carries some of the desired feeling i had hoped to evoke.

happy with this layout prototype i'm now all ready to take the whole lot of pieces into the gallery space and set them up to suit the dynamics of the architecture with which it will exist. tomorrow is install day.

  
this is everything all sorted out so i can pack it all up and take it into the city on the train

inspiration from the field

i am pretty much dying to get into the space at west wing gallery so i can get started on this work. all the amps are built now, all the contact microphones are made. i just need to get into the space, set them up, and decide how best to present the work. while i have decided to put aside living plants for this show, there is a growing desire in me to reconsider this idea and keep that possibility open. again, it's all really dependent on the conditions of the site and the way the materials function.

anyway, in the meantime, i stumbled on this great artwork by angelo vermeulen:

building some assemblages

after a rather frustrating error with some soldering that resulted in one of my amps being destroyed, today was much more successful. another amp built, this time successfully, worked on the first test and brings the total to 3 constructed amplifiers.

 this is the amp i messed up, literally, burning the connections into oblivion.

this basically breaks the chain of connections and means the circuit is broken.

 successful amp construction - testing

whilst i wait for jaycar to reopen after the holidays, i moved on to making the contact microphones. after some net surfing about these microphones and some youtube videos on how to make them i discovered you can take these sensors called piezo sensors, cut the plastic casing off of them, and extract the brass and ceramic disc from the middle. 

 this is how the sensors look when you buy them

this is the inner disc that you take out,

and these things are the microphones.

the inner disc is able to detect vibrations. the ceramic bit just moves very slightly, simply by pressure. you basically just connect the wires to an amp, so it makes the tiny fluctuations larger. then plug a speaker into the amp to hear what the vibrations sound like.

placing the discs against walls, glass, wood or really, any surface, means that they detect the sound waves hitting the material and the vibrations caused by anything else touching the material.

for this next show, 4 of these will be placed against the 4 pipes in the middle of the room. when i went to look at the exhibition space i noticed these pipes were each emitting a subtle sound of water, echoing metallic sounds and what i thought were human voices. so that experience led to the idea of amplifying those sounds to enable them to fill the space like liquid.

proof of concept

i've decided that the mixer is not the best way to amplify the signal from the pipes, instead i'm going to build mini-amps for each pipe. that way each of the 4 speakers i'm planning to use will each be individually the sound of one of the pipes. one pipe, one speaker. 4 individual pipes, 4 individual speakers.

 i found this sound mixer, with 5 inputs, in the rubbish!

 this is a rig up for testing 

- speaker at left, mini-amp in the middle (circuit board),

power off to transformer at top, contact mic at right.

 close up mini-amp, built from an electronics kit

this contact mic was made by artist Riki-Metisse Marlow

drawing out some ideas, considered mounting amp on pipe

getting a feel for how the 4 pipes would look with the 4 amps and 4 speakers,
and trying to figure out how to get the power to each amp

decided here to run the power cables up the pipes and into the roof,
creating much cleaner lines in the 'system'

sequence of developed ideas through drawings (left to right)

i'll have to make 2 more mini-amps, as i have 2 left over from an artwork i exhibited last year. and i'll need to get 4 desk lamps. that should be all i need to purchase to complete the work.

bus projects at west wing

information about the next show for bus projects is here.

studio play vs park play

found some carpet lying around that i can use as a ground for preparing this next sculpture.

this is close to the flooring of the site at west wing, so will help to get a better feel for how the work will look. 

also, i've been completely reinvigorated to go on long walks around my area again, what with my car being written off and all. plus the general joy of longer days and sunshine... occasional as it is in melbourne at the moment. i've been keeping a diary of some photos and making some videos which i'll need to edit down soon. the diary is on tumblr here.

 

new symbols of nature

it had to happen at some point, and i think the time was right. 

plants have been dropped from the installation.

plants have been a very regular material in my work for some time now. perhaps to the point of becoming some sort of signature, where occasionally i am being referred to as the 'plant guy'. now there's a whole variety of good reasons to use plants in art, and it is something that will always be part of my repertoire. but as i have come to realise that my work is about systems, and the plants i use signify just one symbolic evocation of natural systems, i feel more free to let them go and pursue some different natural elements that also evoke symbolic meaning for natural systems.

i had started with logs, way back in 2008, as the starting point of natural materials in my work. natural materials that connote 'nature' and the archive of information contained therein. then i transitioned from those dead and discarded living materials, to plants that were actually alive. this introduced issues like the biophilia hypothesis into my work and was a more direct way of engaging with the 'natural', living world around us, or amongst us.

this next transition goes back in the other direction, in a way, by pursuing natural elements that are even less 'alive' (or perhaps even, less 'conscious') than either logs, wood or living plants. for this next show, with its connections to the architecture of the site, i am going to use rock as a material to represent the natural.

rocks are as equally of the natural world as a tiger, an orchid or a cloud. some theories have it that the world is in fact one functioning system, where all these natural elements - from rocks and sand and dirt, to oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, to termites and kangaroos and humans - are all functioning together to make life possible on earth. they each facilitate the functioning of each other's collective environmental needs.

artist giuseppe penone describes rocks as liquid materials that appear to us as solid only because of our limited time frame of conscious awareness. in the grand scheme of universal time, a rock transitions through many stages in creation and destruction, only existing as a hard rock for the blink of an eye in the broad spectrum of time of the earth's lifespan.

also, i like the correlation between the rock as a natural element, and how we have unitised it into a cobblestone and used thousands to articulate our architectural environment - natural system coopted as cultural system. 

for this site, in the melbourne cbd, the obvious rock choice is bluestone.  this highly recognisable part of melbourne's architecture, especially from the gold rush era, is actually cooled lava from a volcano flow.

in the interest of stripping the work back to its elements a bit more - in contrast to a habit i have of overloading my work - this sketch is exploring the speaker cone as stripped down sound producer. it requires some sort of armature to stand up, so loses some of its potency i think. 

the desk lamps still seem to have more impact for me, so they remain first choice at the moment. i like the way they imply that the internal infrastructure of an office environment appears to be interrogating/investigating/nurturing the architectural building blocks of its own habitat. building blocks which are made of the earth, are natural, and form the foundation of its existence.

process insights

so, for the upcoming show at west wing i started off with the idea of plant robots. 

you can see a pot plant robot clinging to the pipes in this sketch

but after some thought i decided to drop the whole anthropomorphic element and just let the system of interconnected parts speak for itself. i'm always keen on evoking a sense of intelligence in systems, and i think producing robots is a little too didactic - in terms of that evocation of articulated thought.

 just mapping out the parts - you might be able to see i thought about building a pipe that i could tap, drawing water out from it for the seedlings, but i think that is a bit too much trickery for my work now.

there's a few elements i need to consider now:

 - what sort of seedlings should i use (i'm contemplating weeds at the moment)

 - how to build the speakers to elicit a sense of nurturing (i'm thinking about building the speaker cones into desk lamp shades)

transition alignments

in a movie i saw recently, a conversation something like this:

reporter: So, Yoko, what are you working on now?
yoko: I'm thinking about scissors.
reporter: What? Just thinking about them?
yoko: Yes

and so it is with any art that takes conceptualism as a fundamental component of its makeup. thinking is much of the work.

with the new year coming (an arbitrary signal marker of time) and the continuing refinement of the direction of my work, i've been thinking of using this next show at west wing as a transition process. my initial intention was to construct some sort of installation of hybrid organic robots made of plants and electronics. my first sketches were rather literal robots. but with the focus of my work on systems, i feel i can start to be less literal in my material creations.

i feel like i should make the systems (machines/robots/hybrids) more abstract and ambiguous, even less heirarchical (eliminating who is 'boss' in the system) and more mysterious.

how this will manifest itself is not yet certain. but i'm going to embrace this exhibition opportunity as a platform for development. the first step is to move back from a literal hybridisation of plant and electronic, in the form of robots with 'plant brains', and to move into new territories of ambiguous systems. materially, for this installation, that means no plant robots listening to the pipes, or moving about the space like living things. instead, the system of functioning parts will simply be there, and the viewer can decipher their relations if they choose.

hybrid robot plants in a shopping mall

a very exciting opportunity has just come along - to be a part of a group show at west space gallery's offshoot, west wing. this came about as a result of the unfortunate closure of the bus projects gallery earlier this year - where i had been booked to exhibit in may. the closure meant the postponement of that exhibition until new premises could be secured or an off-site opportunity presented itself. west space came to the rescue with their gallery space in the melbourne central shopping centre.

the show is in late january - more details soon.

the location offers a great chance to engage directly with the architecture of the site. i chose a small room to put my work into due to its suitability for a very real engagement with the building's functional components. a series of pipes runs vertically right through the room and if you press your ear against them you can hear the distant sounds of the shopping mall.

 the small room through the right door

 the pipes that pierce the room vertically

 an odd interruption into the white cube

the work i had proposed for the bus gallery show was very much designed to fit a very particular space - a long, skinny space. this new space affords me an opportunity to engage with the site in a different way, most especially because of the 'intruding' elements of the foundational architecture that break into the otherwise white cubical office-like space. 

discovering that i could hear water flowing and the echoing sounds of the extended building through the pipes was a key element in generating ideas for making work in the space. here's a small list of ideas that are getting the ball rolling:

 - the secluded, isolated nature of the space (office room, door) lends itself to being a microcosm environment. this makes me think of things like museum dioramas and zoo exhibits for reptiles or nocturnal animals.

 - the sound element is most intriguing, making me consider encouraging the viewer to listen to the pipes. also makes me think that maybe plants could be listening to pipes, as if tapping them.

 - the ceiling is made of corrugated perspex, the kind of roof that is common as backyard terracing for verandas in the suburbs. with my work i automatically then think of hanging plants and outdoor lighting.

 - the rock that also pierces one wall suggests a hidden infrastructure, something more earthy and traditionally constructed than the more obvious shiny facade of white walls and other commercially oriented presentations of the shopping centre.

out of these thoughts i have been getting a strong desire to construct an installation of hybrid plant/robot machines that are clambering about in the space, listening to the pipes and using the sound they gather from that to stimulate the growth of new plants.