Residency Reports by John Wynne and Volker Morawe

1. Salon20
text and images by Volker Morawe

Salon20 represents the rebirth of an old beauty machine. In its former life it was used to burn the consum societies fat. It was found on the streets of London by one of the students and was brought to the gallery. Then we hacked the electric circuits to use the knobs and the original rythm of the electric voltage which was switched on and off to stimulate the muscles. This rythm which can still be manipulated by the salon20 user alternates between the two light/sound boxes and controls the two channel sound environment. Also there are ten knobs to control and manipulate the sounds. This sounds are recorded from the building as a basic sound footage wich was used for further sound manipulations. The installation provideas an incentive by standing between the two ligth/sound walls, playing with the knobs of salon20 and diving into the sound and light atmosphere. You can create spacy distorted feedback sounds or an sweet and chilling sound sphere.

Mo and me hacking the machine. While I’m turning the knobs and searching for the right tune Moe is doing the programming.

One ot the main parts of the salon20 installation. It’s the electric head quarter where old school meets the state of the art technology of the 21. century.

Plans are made how to built the two giant light boxes.

Each light box cotains 16 bright halogen spot lights.

The one box shines red …

.. and the other one is (a kind of) green.

Another feature was aded by Moe. He came up with idea to use the turning of the knobs to create an interesting abstract drawing. After a while of use you can see the drawing which represents the interaction between salon20 and the user. We placed the monitors outside of the installation to make it more interesting.

2. Sound CAD
text by John Wynne

16.1 channel sound installation by John Wynne
Video installation by Moe Ekapob and Kevin Ling

The sound installation component of this piece was impossible to document: it was in total darkness, so there was nothing to photograph; the sound was inextricably site-specific and dependent on 16 separate channels and a large subwoofer. It began in response to a CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawing made by one of the AA participants as an aid to the discussion of what we would do in this space. My initial idea was to try to make the equivalent of a CAD drawing using only sound, starting with a 3-dimensional ‘wireframe’ line drawing to trace out the dimensions of the space and then rendering the walls with ‘sheets’ of sound. The challenge was to find sounds which would remain localised as much as possible to the surfaces of the space but which were also sufficiently distinguishable from each other to allow the visitor to negotiate the space using only sound, in the total absence of light.

Spending a lot of time in the space, I became acutely aware of the sounds from elsewhere in the building which filter through to and resonate in the basement space, so I decided to populate the Sound CAD with sounds recorded by Volker and the AA participants from the building itself. These elements, filtered through my subjective experience of them as I worked in the dark, added a dramatic element to the work which obliterates one’s ability to navigate the space and is uncharacteristic of my usual practice but it brought the space to life and announced its presence to the rest of the building.

The video component of the installation is by Moe Ekapob and Kevin Ling, who set out to work back from my ideas of rendering space with sound to investigate the notion of drawing within architectural practice and the perception of space through sound. If space is defined through CAD drawing as light illuminate by the computer screen, can we also use sound in a similar manner? Their animations are the result of incorporating concepts from the realm of sound within the development of architectural drawings.