16 April – 5 June 2011
a nod to Cage
To accompany the exhibition Every Day is a Good Day, the Pavilion curated a season of art and sound installations, with a nod to John Cage. An eclectic group of sound and visual artists were invited to respond to the artist’s work and ideas. These artists’ projects were installed throughout the building during April, May and the beginning of June.
The a nod to Cage live programme saw performances by Mount Kimbie + Creep, Margaret Leng Tan, Stewart Lee’s reading of Indeterminacy, eighth blackbird, Keith Tippett and the Faster Than Sound project by Brainwaves: Mira Calix, Anna Meredith, Aurora Quartet, Loop.pH.
Random Fridays reaunched this season with two free events featuring some of the UK’s most cutting edge contemporary acts, presenting work in response to Cage’s work and ideas. To read more about the acts that appeared click here.
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PROGRAMME
16 – 20 April
Felix Thorn Felix’s Machines
Felix’s Machines are music making sculptures. They were constructed in his bedroom and facilitate music by translating rhythmic audio structures into a three-dimensional visual show. The Machines are musical instruments as well as kinetic sculptures and invite an audience to share the experience of their creator. Thorn says: “I aim to build a space where artificial and dream-like environments can become a reality.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Ajg1G3vik
Friday 22 April (Random Friday)
Jane Ormerod
“Jane Ormerod’s magnificent work belongs in a grand poetry museum on a heavily-populated space station outside Earth’s predictability. One of the most imaginative, persistent poetry visionaries, she breathes fresh perspective into the ears of every life form she comes across in the universe. Jane Ormerod performed in the evening of 22 April as part of a Random Friday. Read more
22 April (Random Friday)
Sophie Fishel Skiddley Bop (2011)
HD film
Skatting is to sing with no words and is an expression of joyful abandon. Skiddley Bop is a film to remind the viewer that each human being has the ability to improvise and to create noise, music and rhythm purely using their own body. Sophie Fishel performed in the evening as part of a Random Friday. Read more
22 April (Random Friday)
Shelley Parker Birdcage (2011)
Auditorium PA, laptop, software
Shelley Parker is a DJ/producer and sound installation artist based in London. She also runs Structure, an experimental electronic label and events programme. Her sonic practice is directly influenced by bass culture, in particular, the Hardcore Continuum and it’s potential connection with contemporary sound art. She has performed at Fabric, Tate Britain and Frieze Art Fair and produced sound installations for the Victoria & Albert museum and CT Editions.
Birdcage is a site specific sound installation, taking a real-time audio feed streamed from the roof of the Pavilion and layering it with low end bass frequencies. Shelley Parker performed in the evening of 22 April as part of a Random Friday. Read more
http://www.shelleyparker.co.uk
22 – 28 April / 22 April (Random Friday)
Void Vector Supercell: A Mixed Media Digital Installation for Sound, Light, Air and Software
A Supercell is a thunderstorm that is characterized by the presence of a mesocyclone; a deep, continuously-rotating updraft. Taking this as a staring point, this work illuminates the hidden by-product of household machines through the combined use of magnetic pick up coils, transducer speakers, self-authored software and kinetic sculpture. As the coils are lifted in the air currents emitted by the fans, they are blown in and out of the magnetic fields created by the motors. These changes in magnetic force are converted to an audio signal. This audio is then routed to transducer speakers that physically shake large sheets of steel which is sent to the software.
This uneasy feeling, of a system on very the brink of chaos and a potential energy that could arc into existence at any second – the essence of Supercell. Void Vector performed in the evening of 22 April as part of a Random Friday. Read more http://supercell.virb.com/videos
22 April – 28 April / 22 April (Random Friday)
FOUND collective Cybraphon (2009)
Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell and Tommy Perman) have teamed up with Professor Simon Kirby and created a robot band called Cybraphon.
Inspired by early 19th-century automatic bands such as the orchestrion and the player piano, Cybraphon is an interactive, mechanical band in a box. It comprises a number of acoustic instruments, antique machinery, and found objects from junk shops, played by over 60 robotic beaters and motors, all housed in an antique wooden display case.
But unlike the orchestrion and player piano, Cybraphon is emotional. Cybraphon’s repertoire has been composed especially by FOUND and spans a range of emotional states. Just like FOUND, Cybraphon is image-conscious and moody, and the music it performs depends on what state of mind it is in.
Cybraphon wants to be popular. By going to its website you affect its mood and the kind of music it plays. Cybraphon regularly checks its MySpace page, worries about how many fans it has on Facebook, looks up its website stats and obsessively Googles itself to see what people are saying about it.
For example, a good review in a local newspaper, will almost certainly cheer up Cybraphon and encourage it to play happier songs. However, Cybraphon is an insecure, egotistical band: a good review will cheer it up for a while, but once the initial excitement dies down it will soon become disillusioned if its fame does not continue to rise. Feed Cybraphon’s ego by visiting www.cybraphon.com
On 22 April FOUND Collective performed with Cybraphon for a Random Friday event as part of a nod to Cage. Read more
30 April – 5 May
Shelley Parker Birdcage (2011)
Auditorium PA, laptop, software
Shelley Parker is a DJ/producer and sound installation artist based in London. She also runs Structure, an experimental electronic label and events programme. Her sonic practice is directly influenced by bass culture, in particular, the Hardcore Continuum and it’s potential connection with contemporary sound art. She has performed at Fabric, Tate Britain and Frieze Art Fair and produced sound installations for the Victoria & Albert museum and CT Editions.
Birdcage is a site specific sound installation, taking a real-time audio feed streamed from the roof of the Pavilion and layering it with low end bass frequencies. Shelley Parker performed in the evening of 22 April as part of a Random Friday. Read more
http://www.shelleyparker.co.uk
30 April – 17 May
Steve Thompson Everyday is a Good Day (2011)
Digital prints mounted on mdf
This work evolved from a creative processing of the exhibition title Everyday is a Good Day. Each word of the title was used as the basis of an image search in an internet search engine. The first ten images found in each search were then layered and rendered transparent in photo-processing software. Five composite images are the final result. The work attempts to update John Cage’s application of chance in printmaking to twenty-first century modes of graphic manipulation and reproduction.
8 – 25 May
Charles Atlas Joints 4tet for Ensemble (1971-2010)
This is an installation of Super-8 colour films of the dancer Merce Cunningham shot by Atlas in 1971. One afternoon, after rehearsal in Irvine, California, Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas went out of the back door of the dance studio to a raised concrete block and started to film. As Cunningham articulated his joints in a minimal dance Atlas filmed in a variety of ways with his new Super-8 camera, shooting close-ups of Cunningham’s wrist, elbow, ankle and knee capturing Cunningham’s unique style of movement. Atlas experimented with different frame rates and levels of blur, but mainly focused on following the dancer’s moving joints as if carefully observing a strange animal. Atlas made nine short films in total, most of which were extended continuous hand-held shots.
For the installation Joints 4tet for Ensemble, Atlas brings the resulting films together for the first time, editing the material into four channels of synchronized video and showing them across a choreographed arrangement of ten different sized monitors in Gallery 2. With this particular configuration of monitors Atlas harks back to ideas first used in 1978 in the creation of Fractions I and Fractions II; a video/dance collaboration he made with Cunningham. The films are accompanied by four channels of collaged sound – re-workings of ambient sound recordings made by John Cage in the 1980s whilst on his travels to cities around the world with Cuningham. As the sound plays out across the monitors, projection lamps cast multiple and shifting shadows over the surrounding walls of the installation. http://www.vilmagold.com/newpages/artists/CA1.htm
Friday 27 May (Random Friday)
AK/DK Requiem for a Building
VJs metaLuna,sonic artist Johanna Bramli and noise-mongers AKDK will be turning the Pavilion into a musical score and sound instrument for the evening. metaLuna will create a live musical score, using the angles and curves of the building as a canvass to project onto. Johanna Bramli and AK/DK will interpret the score, using record styli and contact mics to literally play the building. AK/DK will perform for the next Random Friday on 27 May. Read more
27 May (Random Friday)
Daisy Grove-Lafarge Music from the Vacuum (2011)
Sound installation
Music from the Vacuum is a response to Cage’s practice. Using a system of chance to re-orchestrate NASA’s Voyager recordings, it creates an audible dilemma: the gallery space brings into existence sounds that can never be heard in their true context; the vacuum from which they were taken. Daisy Grove-Lafarge will perform at the next Random Friday on 27 May. Read more
28 May – 5 June
Joseph Long Mecannaissance (2011)
Timber, MDF, video camera, monitor
Ballet Dancer: Grace Yoell, Tap Dancer: Georgina Norris
Joseph Long says “In my work I view the manmade as prosthesis. Creations that physically and mentally have the ability to enable and restrict us simultaneously. In Mecannaissance, I continue to explore the relationship between the inanimate and animate. Using dance as a specialist tool for understanding physicality and psychology I am attempting to not only examine the discourse between each other but between us and the artificial creations that influence and guide our thoughts and actions.”
19 May – 5 June / Friday 27 May (Random Friday)
Lucy Phillips what cannot be seen
Ongoing project (started 2010)
Inkjet prints from scanned photographic paper negatives, handwritten and typed texts, printouts of emails. (in display cases) original paper negatives, handmade matchbox pinhole cameras, handwritten and typed texts and letters, related ephemera.
what cannot be seen is an attempt to create a visual and textual archive of the unseen by returning to the fundamentals of photographic image making. Inspired by the artist’s own experiments with pinhole photography and French artist Sophie Calle’s use of the camera as a covert device, Phillips constructed 20 pinhole cameras from matchboxes and invited people to take part in a postal photography project via a Facebook status update. See Lucy Phillips’ what cannot be seen at the next Random Friday on 27 May. Read more
15 April – 5 June
Charlie Hooker Audio Accompaniment (2011)
Yamaha Disklavier piano, laptop, Geiger-counter
Galactic cosmic rays are particles emitted from our sun and every sun in the universe – literally stardust. They enter our atmosphere and continually pass through us from all angles like flying sparks or rain, going through your body, the building and through the earth, emerging from the other side to continue their invisible journey across the universe.
Each note played by the keyboard has been triggered by a radioactive cosmic ray particle passing on its immense journey through space, through the piano, through the sensor fitted within it, and through you – taking a tiny shadow of you with it as it continues its journey towards infinity. http://www.charliehooker.co.uk/
The De La Warr Pavillion would like to thank Yamaha Piano for the kind support of this installation with the loan of the Disklavier piano.
15 April – 5 June
Yoko Ono Play It By Trust
Play It By Trust has a special connection to John Cage. The concept for this work was first realized in 1966 as White Chess Set, which is an all white chess set, and one of Yoko’s most iconic conceptual works. In 1987, Yoko remade the piece for the first time in bronze, as a tribute to John Cage for his 75th birthday for an exhibition at Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. For this version, Yoko retitled the piece Play It By Trust, which has since been used for the several other versions she has gone on to make. http://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/2892798380/
16 April – 5 June
Hugh Fox Mind is Moving (2011)
Performance/two channel video installation
The work focuses on John Cage’s favourite sound experience; the sound of silence (the aural landscape of our everyday lives). For Cage, the beauty of this audio landscape is that it’s always different, no sound is ever the same.
With opposing soundtracks, two screens will broadcast an audio and visual meditation that explores the relationship between the sounds of our minds and the movements of our bodies, exhibiting how we can appear physically still, with the mind moving at speed, or moving relentlessly on the surface, but experiencing a deep state of meditative flow within.