"The Subliminal Kid moved in and
took over bars cafes and juke boxes of the world's cities and
installed radio transmitters and microphones in each bar so that
the music and the talk in any bar could be heard in all his bars
and he had tape recorders in each bar that played and recorded at
arbitrary intervals and his agents moved back and forth with
portable tape recorders and brought back street sound and talk and
music and poured it into his recorder array so he set waves and
eddies and tornadoes of sound down all your streets" - William
Burroughs, Nova Express (1964).
This is a project that i'll admit didn't quite work - it wasn't as
big or as clever as some of the stuff my contempories were making
at the time - it wasn't using interactive devices to sense human
input, nor was it streaming information off the internet and making
a live soundtrack. It was a child's potty with a pair of headphones
playing 99 random pieces of sound art, field recordings and music.
If I am perfectly honest, I just wanted a nice object people could
look at in an art gallery, as a kind of Trojan Horse (or Trojan
Tortoise) so that they'd have to listen to digital sound art
instead. So it's really just a nice shell for my own eddies and
tornadoes of sound. The other thing that motivated me here was that
I had mixed feelings for interactive digital art projects around at
the time (I had built up a library of artists doing interactivity
when I worked for Lovebytes digital arts festival) - those guys
used masses of interactivity in their work, but, and this is a very
big but, most of the compositions informed by a love of programming
languages and processes using MAX MSP sounded pretty random -
occasionally wonderful and liberating, but more often than not, not
something you'd want to inflict onto other people.
In 2001 I didn't know what I wanted to be. I didn't realise I was a
polymash back then! Recording things made me very happy. Around
this time I was signed to www.bip-hop.com in France with my
electronic music, so I myself had been undergoing an electronic
makeover "back and forth with my own portable tape recorders." I'd
also been officially diagnosed with M.E. a year or two earlier and
had scaled down my film making projects somewhat and had to
concentrate instead on my health, personal space and environment.
All through this time I had been making a diary of field
recordings, digital phrasing and phasing experiments, as well as
collaborations through the 56k internet a little in line with the
Burroughs quote above. Radio transmitters were big interests to me
as well as people who covertly recorded private conversations, like
Scanner, whom I had made a South Bank Show on earlier in my
career.
I was also getting a little fed up of digital work I was seeing
being ever so serious and austere. Don't get me wrong, I like to
think I can rock the serious circuit-board with the rest of them,
but every once in a while you need to take yourself to Oxfam, see
what we threw out a few years back and see if we can rewire,
remake, reappraise or re-appropriate Duchamp-style. So I saw this
child's potty in Oxfam. It was very Boards of Canada. Very "Look
Around You" - vintage child's toy / poo training device.
There was a folder on my new desktop machine in my cupboard studio
that simply said "excreta" and I decided to buy the tortoise potty
- for £1 I seem to recall, and basically made a CD based on these
99 tracks, bought a CD player that fitted inside the potty and sent
it off to The Buddle Arts Centre in Newcastle for a group
show.
So it didn't quite work in the respect I was cheating a bit. It was
a daft little object in the corner of a gallery with a little light
on it and a stool to sit on. But people did sit on it and some even
liked the noises. I should stop apologising!