In 1981 I began developing the “Long String Instrument,” in which rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, fifty or more feet in length and installed in a performance space. Listening to the instrument has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano.
The instrument is acoustic. Wooden box resonators are mounted on a wall and twenty to thirty strings terminate into each resonator soundboard. Performers walk between pathways of strings suspended at waist-height. The instrument is played by “bowing” with rosined fingertips while walking. A uniquely designed brass capo on each wire changes the vibrating string length much as a capo on a guitar. Tuned in just intonation, the pitch range is determined by length: A4 (440 Hz, open A string on the violin) requires eight meters in length. Every octave lower requires a doubling of length. These enormous lengths are required when strings are excited in the longitudinal mode, or played by “bowing” lengthwise.
My music explores natural tunings based on the physics of vibrating strings. Through observation, I have determined that there is an optimal “bowing” speed in which string speaks most clearly in the longitudinal mode, presumably based on a relationship to the speed of the wave moving through the material. In the late 1980s I conceived of a graphic notation system that still functions as the basis for scoring my work, where timing and coordination of parts are determined by distance walked. Numbers placed on the floor at metric intervals are used as reference points indicated in the score. Transitions can be coordinated based on the time it takes to arrive at predetermined locations, thereby “choreographing” repeatable events to occur at specific locations. Strings vibrate in mathematical subdivisions of the total string length. When passing over the harmonic nodes of each string, overtones associated with that location emerge. (For example, the perfect 5th interval can be heard at one third and two thirds of the total string length.) By taking into consideration these divisions or nodal points, (where pronounced overtones emerge) musical events can be aligned to coincide with specific overtone combinations.
In 1981 I began developing the “Long String Instrument,” in which rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, fifty or more feet in length and installed in a performance space. Listening to the instrument has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano.
The instrument is acoustic. Wooden box resonators are mounted on a wall and twenty to thirty strings terminate into each resonator soundboard. Performers walk between pathways of strings suspended at waist-height. The instrument is played by “bowing” with rosined fingertips while walking. A uniquely designed brass capo on each wire changes the vibrating string length much as a capo on a guitar. Tuned in just intonation, the pitch range is determined by length: A4 (440 Hz, open A string on the violin) requires eight meters in length. Every octave lower requires a doubling of length. These enormous lengths are required when strings are excited in the longitudinal mode, or played by “bowing” lengthwise.
My music explores natural tunings based on the physics of vibrating strings. Through observation, I have determined that there is an optimal “bowing” speed in which string speaks most clearly in the longitudinal mode, presumably based on a relationship to the speed of the wave moving through the material. In the late 1980s I conceived of a graphic notation system that still functions as the basis for scoring my work, where timing and coordination of parts are determined by distance walked. Numbers placed on the floor at metric intervals are used as reference points indicated in the score. Transitions can be coordinated based on the time it takes to arrive at predetermined locations, thereby “choreographing” repeatable events to occur at specific locations. Strings vibrate in mathematical subdivisions of the total string length. When passing over the harmonic nodes of each string, overtones associated with that location emerge. (For example, the perfect 5th interval can be heard at one third and two thirds of the total string length.) By taking into consideration these divisions or nodal points, (where pronounced overtones emerge) musical events can be aligned to coincide with specific overtone combinations.
Creative Time presents Playing the Building, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation by renowned artist David Byrne. The artist transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and “play.” The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building's cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features—metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.
-- FROM THE DESCRIPTION FOR CREATIVE TIME'S PRESENTATION OF "PLAYING THE BUILDING" BY DAVID BYRNE
Note: Last year, Justin Downs wrote an article for Rhizome which outlined the design and fabrication of this project. Read it here.
Creative Time presents Playing the Building, a 9,000-square-foot, interactive, site-specific installation by renowned artist David Byrne. The artist transforms the interior of the landmark Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan into a massive sound sculpture that all visitors are invited to sit and “play.” The project consists of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building's cavernous second-floor gallery, that controls a series of devices attached to its structural features—metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrate, strike, and blow across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.
-- FROM THE DESCRIPTION FOR CREATIVE TIME'S PRESENTATION OF "PLAYING THE BUILDING" BY DAVID BYRNE
Note: Last year, Justin Downs wrote an article for Rhizome which outlined the design and fabrication of this project. Read it here.
A Small Migration was a piece first presented as part of the show “Sonic Differences” which was a part of the Biennial of Electronic Art Perth, in 2004. This work is a direct extension of my previous “physical” installations, with this project extending both the scale and complexity of my previous installations, as well as the nature and complexity of my work with hybrid physical/computational systems.
A Small Migration consists of many piano wires strung roughly 8 or 9 feet above the ground across an open gallery or public space. The wires are fixed at the ends with tuning blocks, so that the walls of the gallery then act as a “sounding board” for the piece. Normally these would be attached to the Gallery Walls, but as the Moores Building in Freemantle, where the exhibition was held, is an historic building, the walls were off-limits, so instead, a scaffold-like structure was built supporting the tuning blocks from above.
Wires are stung in parallel, and roughly 3 inches apart, and as long as 30 or 40 feet (depending on the space available). Small motors tap each wire with a striker attached to the shaft of the motor, causing sound. Each motor is sent a series of short electrical pulses by the micro-controller, causing it to strike the wire, which creates a disturbance that generates sound and also visibly shakes the wire. The rhythmic patterns used are those found in nature, and are constantly accelerating and decelerating and are derived from indeterminate processes such as 1/f noise algorithms. The installation contains a great many wires and motors (variable given the space) —the number in this installation being 32 wires and motors.
A Small Migration was a piece first presented as part of the show “Sonic Differences” which was a part of the Biennial of Electronic Art Perth, in 2004. This work is a direct extension of my previous “physical” installations, with this project extending both the scale and complexity of my previous installations, as well as the nature and complexity of my work with hybrid physical/computational systems.
A Small Migration consists of many piano wires strung roughly 8 or 9 feet above the ground across an open gallery or public space. The wires are fixed at the ends with tuning blocks, so that the walls of the gallery then act as a “sounding board” for the piece. Normally these would be attached to the Gallery Walls, but as the Moores Building in Freemantle, where the exhibition was held, is an historic building, the walls were off-limits, so instead, a scaffold-like structure was built supporting the tuning blocks from above.
Wires are stung in parallel, and roughly 3 inches apart, and as long as 30 or 40 feet (depending on the space available). Small motors tap each wire with a striker attached to the shaft of the motor, causing sound. Each motor is sent a series of short electrical pulses by the micro-controller, causing it to strike the wire, which creates a disturbance that generates sound and also visibly shakes the wire. The rhythmic patterns used are those found in nature, and are constantly accelerating and decelerating and are derived from indeterminate processes such as 1/f noise algorithms. The installation contains a great many wires and motors (variable given the space) —the number in this installation being 32 wires and motors.
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.....
......The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema—to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.
-- EXCERPTS FROM "IN DEFENSE OF THE POOR IMAGE" BY HITO STEYERL IN E-FLUX JOURNAL #10, NOVEMBER 2009
The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.
The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.....
......The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema—to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.
-- EXCERPTS FROM "IN DEFENSE OF THE POOR IMAGE" BY HITO STEYERL IN E-FLUX JOURNAL #10, NOVEMBER 2009
Rhizome launches its annual Community Campaign today! True to our founding as an artist-centered network focused on a new medium, all our activities further a dynamic and groundbreaking art form, and an international community around it. We are reaching out to you to ask that you make contribution now during this important Campaign. Our goal is to raise $35,000, which will directly support our programs and services for artists.
With funds raised through our 2009 Campaign, we will:
All of these initiatives are done in service to our community. But, we need your support to realize them. As an independent 501(c)3, Rhizome’s fundraising is entirely independent; we rely primarily on foundations, government agencies, an annual benefit and our community for support.
Rhizome launches its annual Community Campaign today! True to our founding as an artist-centered network focused on a new medium, all our activities further a dynamic and groundbreaking art form, and an international community around it. We are reaching out to you to ask that you make contribution now during this important Campaign. Our goal is to raise $35,000, which will directly support our programs and services for artists.
With funds raised through our 2009 Campaign, we will:
All of these initiatives are done in service to our community. But, we need your support to realize them. As an independent 501(c)3, Rhizome’s fundraising is entirely independent; we rely primarily on foundations, government agencies, an annual benefit and our community for support.
Yes, it sure is! Today we launched a re-design to our front page, moving it from a three to two-column format. We are planning to launch an overall re-design to the website in Spring 2010. We made this change now to give more room to the art showcased in our blog and to make our activities and programs, all detailed in the sidebar to the right, more clear. We hope this adjustment makes our site easier to read and navigate.