Collaborations / Design For Artists

Following is a selection of collaborations and projects by other artists that I have worked on in various capacities, as artist, designer, consultant, and technician. For other projects that involve my work with other artists and researchers, visit: Streets: Past Present and Future, Performance, Soun.Din, Passing Glances, themetropolitancomplex.com.

Escape into Sound
(with Siobhán Clancy)

Collaboration / Project Consultation / Worskhops - November, 2009

Siobhan Clancy invited me to work on a collaborative art project that she had initiated at the Iona Centre via the National Council for the Blind of Ireland (NCBI). Clancy was working with a group of blind and vision impaired service users at the Iona Centre on a series of mixed-media artorks, and was curious about integrating sound into the group's experience and project output. I proposed a series of workshops that would allow the group to explore various forms of field recording, active listening, and live mixing and sound spatialization, and to discuss the production of an exhibition involving sound art.

During our conversations, the group decided to focus on the Grand Canal in North Dublin - and on the various sounds produced by water - as the site / theme for producing this series of works. We organized a field trip / workshop on a barge, moving slowly along the canal and capturing recordings of the boat, the environment, the water, and the activity of our passing using different microphones. A week later, I set up a workshop in which the group mixed different excerpts from these recordings and moved them within a four-speaker array set up in our project space at the Iona Centre. We discussed different techniques of soundscape composition, and worked on developing concepts concerning how these sounds could be used in a gallery-based exhibition, or in a soundwalk scenario.

The output of these sessions was both an exhibition entitled Escape into Sound at The Mill in Dublin and a soundwalk organized to take place during Culture Night 2009. For more information, visit theartoflistening.wordpress.com.

The core members of the group participating in this project were

Fire Practice Theatre
(Susan Thomson)

Sound Design - November, 2009

Susan Thomson invited me to work on sound design for her short film Fire Practice Theatre, which involved developing a scheme for creating both a four-channel and a stereo audio mix that would work with the film's two-screen format. The final mix for the first portion of the film focused on split-screen dialog and subtle room ambience, while the second part of the film opened up into a dense, roaring collage of fire, voices, and turgid, looped strings. The tone of the sound design was kept minimal and dark, to highlight the vague repetitions of dialogue that lie at the heart of film's psychological drama and sense of loss.

"Residing somewhere between fiction and documentary, this two screen film shows firefighters practicing their skills on a tall purpose built house in a fire station. This is depicted as if it were a piece of theatre, a rehearsal or ritual in a theatre where only one play is performed. There are different levels of fiction. A script is performed by actors playing firefighters; lines are swapped, dramatically forgotten and a scene arrives early. The house is un lived-in, sinister, the piece reminiscent of a psyche where trauma and desire are endlessly replayed" (Text from thisisnotashop website).

Fire Practice Theatre was written and directed by Susan Thomson with DP Piers McGrail. It was first shown at thisisnotashop in Dublin in November 2009.

Bit Symphonies
(Liam O'Callaghan)

Electronics / System Design - August, 2009

I worked with mixed-media artist Liam O'Callaghan designing an audio control system for his sound sculpture Bit Symphonies, an assemblage of old record players and stereos. He had created several detailed compositions for this sculpture using locked grooves and other vinyl manipulation techniques while manually adjusting the volume of the individual record players (each of which playing back passages from records that he had selected).

O'Callaghan wanted to have the system run automatically, with individual controls over the volume and tone of each record player / stereo (eight in total). I opened the record players (many of which were built into all-in-one stereo units) and routed their outputs through special preamps and into a computer running Audiomulch via a multi-channel soundcard. I constructed a simple interface that allowed O'Callaghan to author curves that would automate the volume and tone of the individual sound channels over a fixed timeline. The individual channels were then routed from the computer back through the individual stereo units, so that the signal from each record player would pass through the appropriate amplifier and speakers and retain the subtle spatialization of the original setup.

The Dublin hackerspace TOG designed a supplementary system for Bit Symphonies, which provided control over the electro-mechanical functions of the record players (turning them on and off and adjusting their speed of rotation).

O'Callaghan prepared several compositions for this project / system, which was shown in The Emerging Art Fair in Berlin in September 2009.

Boys Before Flowers
(with Jennie Guy)

Collaboration / Project Management - July, 2009

Boys Before Flowers is a collaboration between artists Jennie Guy and Sven Anderson, named after the popular Korean drama show which provides the project's core content. Broadcast in Korea in 2009, this show is a window into Korean (and Asian) pop culture, as well as a mirror reflecting more universal issues and themes.

Boys Before Flowers is focused on contemporary processes of cultural transition / transmission / translation, as well as with media-recycling (working with popular media culture as a readymade), international media distribution communities, and with an incidental parallel that we see emerging between the histories and contemporary situations of Ireland and Korea.

Simultaneously, the project amplifies a personal obsession with consuming media cultures originating from the Other, hinting at a process of West-East-West voyeurism in which perceptions of fashion, iconography, beauty, sexuality, wealth, and power are forced into an internationally distributed, post-colonial feedback loop.

The concept for this collaboration was first discussed in July 2009, and the project is still in a planning phase. For the full project text, visit Jennie Guy's Boys Before Flowers project page.

Trespass
(Aoife Desmond and Seoidin O'Sullivan)

Sound Design / Field Recording - March 2009

"Trespass is a collaborative art project by Aoife Desmond and Seoidín O'Sullivan that engages research and action with forgotten urban landscapes. Trespass investigate and intervene in disused urban space. They research and reveal the delicate balance between nature and the built environment. Trespass investigates the different issues around land use and ownership through documentation and performative actions." (Text from the Trespass website).

I collaborated with Trespass by taking part in serveral site visits in 2008. I made a series of field recordings that captured both the vacant stillness of the undisturbed sites as well as the subtle sonic artifacts of the group's actions as we moved through these sites to document and to perform.

I worked closely with video editor Aoibheann O’Sullivan and the Trespass team composing sound for five video pieces and a single sound with mixed-media piece that were installed in The Lab in Dublin in March 2009. The sound for these pieces emphasized a documentary approach, with minute elements of artificial edititing / intervention underscoring certain visual details in the films. I worked on arranging these various sonic elements amongst other objects imported from the original Trespass sites within the exhibition space, balancing different elements so as to create a quiet but immersive sound environment that would saturate the gallery with traces of the derelict sites.

This collaboration was initiated based on an interest in the exploration of derelict spaces shared by Desomond, O'Sullivan and myself. I had worked on similar tactics of field recording in 2004, in my project Disintegration Process.

For more information, visit the Trespass website.

Public Arena
(Bik van der Pol)

Sound Recording - October, 2008

I worked with Dutch artists Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol and producer Ali Curran on the project Public Arena, a triptych exploring the history and controversy surrounding the construction of Tallaght Stadium commissioned as part of the In Context 3 public art programme by South Dublin County Council. I worked as sound recordist for a shoot that was edited into a 33-minute video piece in which a group of local teenagers re-enacted conversations concerning the history of Tallaght Stadium, transcribed by Bik van der Pol from interviews with older local residents. We used a combination of wireless body-mics and a set of shotgun mics for the shoot.

For more information about Public Arena, please visit www.bikvanderpol.net or the PublicArt.ie Public Arena project page.

Here Lies In Film
(Operating Theatre and Christopher Doyle)

Installation Consultation - September, 2008

I worked with Operating Theatre (Olwen Fouere and Roger Doyle), cinamatographer Christopher Doyle, producer Ali Curran, editor Simon Hudson, and technician Fergus Kelly on adapting a film of a previous live peformance work (along with several other audio-visual elements) into the gallery at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios (TBG&S) in Dublin.

To make the most of the film's sound within the gallery space, I set up an array of four speakers (plus a subwoofer) in the gallery to distribute the film's two channel sound in a manner that would promote the whispered dialog near a bench positioned in front of the main screen (the focus point of the audience) while filling the relatively undampened, reverberant room with the shuffling dronescape composed by Roger Doyle. The subwoofer was positioned behind the main viewing point, projecting low frequency sound towards the front section of the gallery to provide a slightly unsettling ambience on entering the space.

I created a customized aperture to mount to the projector that displayed the main film, softening the edges of the projection so that they blended into the wall and surrounding gallery space. This subtly framed Christopher Doyle's atmospheric camerawork and Olwen Fouere's portrayal of Antonin Artaud's psychologically traumatic time spent in Ireland in 1937.

Just Tell Me The Truth
(with Louise Cherry and Jennie Guy)

System Design / Project Consultation - August, 2008

"Over 6 hours 23 interviewees signed a social contract allowing them to be hooked up to a lie-detector, filmed, recorded and photographed by Jennie Guy & Louise Cherry whilst being asked 74 interrogative questions. The questions focused on truth telling & a number of the questions specifically related to what it means to be an artist working in the current circumstance of the studio/gallery/museum/funding mechanisms and how this relates to the way an artist might construct their identity. A wall based exhibition comprising of photos and lie detector read outs unfolded temporally as each interview took place. Audience members could freely wander amidst a laboratory like environment but were discouraged by a hostess from talking to any of the cast and advised not to touch any of the equipment and to remain silent at all times." (Text from www.jennieguy.com).

I designed the system for this installation / performance (installed at Studio 6 / Temple Bar Gallery and Studios in Dublin). The basis of the project was that the entire apparatus being presented was a lie; the 'lie detector' was actually a dummy-circuit, and the variable that supposedly fluctuated in response to whether or not someone was telling the truth was controlled by subtle mouse-movements made by the performer operating the computer system in the installation.

The system was designed in VVVV, displaying a real-time graph of the fabricated variable and saving this data to text files that were printed out and hung on the walls of the gallery next to photographs of the interviewees. I acted as both system designer and project consultant, discussing how the project would operate with Cherry and Guy and helping them determine the rules that governed this performance.

More information on this project can be found on Jennie Guy's Just Tell Me The Truth project page.

An exercise with questions and answers
(Gerard Byrne)

Electronics / System Design - July, 2008

I designed and built a custom projector shutter for Gerard Byrne's video work An exercise with questions and answers, which premiered in the 2008 Biennale of Sydney and has been shown subsequently at the Lisson Gallery (London) in 2009 and at Lismore Castle Arts in (Waterford) in 2010.

Byrne wanted to create dramatic black-outs at certain moments in this work, which depicts an acting excercise focused on reenacting a text by a Nazi war-criminal. As the video abruptly cut to black in the final gallery installation, it was necessary to quickly mask the video projector to cut off the tiny amount of light that is projected even when the video signal is entirely black, so that the gallery would be absolutely dark.

Although there were several such devices on the market, the control protocols that they utilized were incompatible with Byrne's playback setup, so I designed a shutter that could be controlled via an audio signal playing back on the LFE (Low Frequency Effect) channel of a Dolby 5.1 encoded sound file. The shutter itself was a simple mechanical device built using an Arduino board and a single servo motor connected to a light (but rigid) wooden shutter. The control protocol allowed Byrne to place an 80-Hz tone on a track in his video editing software to control whenever he wanted the shutter to cover the projector.