Last Thursday I attended the MA Sound Arts postgraduate show that took place in a very interesting venue called Dilston Grove, an old church converted into a gallery space. In the show, I experienced both sound art pieces and performances from the MA course students. I was deeply impressed by the pieces displayed in the gallery and I thought that every artist featured in the gallery was extremely talented. A few pieces stood out for me, the first one can be seen in the picture above, it consists of a digitally animated ball displayed in a screen and a microphone hanging from the ceiling in front of the screen (the microphone is not very visible in the picture). The microphone was connected to the visuals parameters of the animated ball, when anyone approached the microphone and talked to it the video would react to the sound source, creating weird alterations to the ball. It was a quite interactive an amusing piece of art and I found it very interesting how visual stimuli would make people change their voice when interacting with the microphone.
The picture above is another piece that I found interesting. It consisted of a turntable playing a vinyl of one of the artist of the gallery, what made the piece interesting was that people where invited to play with the velocity of the turntable, creating unique tempo alterations to the original composition of the record. A speaker was connected to the turntable and it spat the content of the vinyl to the open atmosphere of the gallery, fusing with other sounds made from the other pieces displayed in the gallery.
Finally the picture above displays my favourite piece of the gallery. This piece combines visual art, sound art and textiles into a single interactive piece. The cloth that can see in the middle between the two speakers, display a distorted map of the world, in the back of the cloth different movement sensors are attached to section of the map and then connected to a theremin that is hidden behind the curtain. Then the signal of the theremin is sent to a Pure Data patch that modulates and sequences the retrived signal into complex sound synthesis. In the bottom section of the piece a small screen was allocated in the ground displaying the Pd patch. The piece related to imagery of water and space, focusing in the textures and connotations behind maps.
The space and venue of the place where great factors in making my experience in the show very special. Every sound produce by each individual sound pieces resonated in the tall walls of the building, creating a thick texture of surround sound. I would argue that the sum up of the sounds made from the individual art pieces with the natural space of the gallery created an independent art piece it own. When focusing in each individual piece I notice how almost all shared an interactive interface, this made the exhibition accessible to any visitor. From what I learned from that exhibition I would say that Sound pieces in contrast with visual art, embrace an individual conjunctive experience, allowing for a communication and interaction between person and art.