Disruption is an installation with the purpose of using a building, set for demolition, as an art gallery. It explores the ideas that I have been thinking about recently - from deciding when something is finished to the aesthetics of decay and mistake. This exhibition aimed to include the materials within the garage, as well as the space within the garage as part of the experience.
The main methods I chose to portray the materiality and space were audio composition and light. Firstly, I recorded different sounds inside the garage, scrapes, bangs, and impulse responses. Then, once I had my materials, I processed them, removing most of the high frequencies. This was done to enlarge the relatively small space. Low frequency sounds are generally imagined to be larger than high frequency sounds. The resulting track was then played back into the garage space in mono, through my HS8. The high frequencies were then created from the same low-frequency track albeit through a transducer set into a small metal tin. As the low frequencies rumbled inaudibly through the transducer, they rattled the small tin and mimicked the sonic rises and falls that occur in the track. The large speaker and the transducer are then placed in opposite sides of the space to create a stereo piece. Leaving a space interrupts the flow between these two sources, adding to the sense of unease within the garage. The resulting sound is now a combination of the original garage sounds (with the original reverberation of the garage), the processed, stretched audio in the track, high frequencies from the material of the tin, all engulfed in the real-time reverberation of the concrete garage walls and large sheet metal doorway.
As the concept revolves around disruption, I wanted to introduce a chaotic lighting element into the space. I had an LED strobe light that originally came with an inbuilt microphone that allowed the lights to react to sound. I decided to remove the condenser microphone it came with and replace it with a contact microphone. The idea behind this was that as people came in to see and experience the installations, the contact microphone would pick up the movements and vibrations through the floor. I decided to turn this feature off due to the distinct lack of foot-traffic in my gallery…
I would like to have been able to include projections of the works I made throughout the term. Some of my videos focus on a circular theme that would have worked nicely as spotlights - illuminating a small portion of the garage, to really bring it away from just being seen as a background and directing the eye towards previously darkened corners.
