[microsound] Exit Through the Gift Shop

[greg hooper]

Well the piece of mine I mentioned is part of  a  series of works I've made over 
the last 30 years called "getting in on the ground floor" which is about the 
socialisation of art practice and the idea of  'career'. So it includes visual 
works ranging from tiny murals painted on single bricks and left around the 
suburbs, to  a band tour where I played my sound works from the car to people 
waiting to cross at the traffic lights as a tour venue.

 www.greg-hooper.com




________________________________
From: Boris Klompus <boris.klompus at gmail.com>
To: microsound at microsound.org
Sent: Thu, 17 February, 2011 6:07:20 PM
Subject: Re: [microsound] Exit Through the Gift Shop

What separates the work of a street artist/graffiti writer from other visual 
artists? Is it the placement, the risk in doing it, the message? Speaking of 
which, what is the message -- is it disruption, thus vandalism, is it just for 
fun or notoriety? Is it just a matter of breaking out of the schmoozy art world, 
and letting one's art out there for others to see, or ignore, or etc, rather 
than proving your worth with grants, CV's and etc in order to get a chance to 
hang some art up on the walls of a predescribed gallery? The audio equivalent to 
acting out based on such questions, would depend on how one answers them. 


Is it the same thing to tag over someone's wall piece as hiding a speaker on 
stage before a performance and using it to interrupt the flow of the concert 
once it has begun?

And what are you going for, startling people, and with it seeing their 
reactions, making people think about things in a different way, taking what is 
normally a mundane moment (potentially) in someone's day and pulling them out 
briefly? 


There are plenty of things that make noise already, for instance the 
pre-recorded lady voice telling my to watch my step on the escalator. Changing 
the recording that gets played back through those speakers, that one is so 
desensitized to hearing, could be much more startling than placing a new sound 
making source in the environment and adding an extra level of sound. It's like 
the taxis in Mumbai that Hans mentioned.

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 6:38 PM, hans w. koch <kochhw at netcologne.de> wrote:

actually, you are of course right, about noise pollution in cities.
>thats why i choose a spot for the installation, which was not easily 
accessible.
>mostly people from the neighbouring residential area would use the traffic 
>island for a stop while crossing the road to the opposite park, when going to 
>walk their dogs.
>i even bought the trashscan to mount it there myself.
>(and it wasn´t playing continously, only when somebody threw something in)
>
>but i would also consider, that there are different types of noise pollution. i 
>was in mumbai 2 years ago, where basically everybody is driving by ear, 
>constantly honking.
>it is loud, but after a couple of days, it fades into background, except of the 
>modern cars, which have a horns especially developped to surpass the prevalent 
>horns of the old taxis.
>high pitched, ultraloud, absolutely killing. it happended to me a couple of 
>times sitting in a moto-rickshaw, that suddenly a new car would pull up on my 
>side and i didn´t cover my ears fast enough and was suffering long after.
>the old horns on the other hand, i learned to hear as a kind of spacial 
>composition, made of hundreds of grains of honking.
>
>
>hans
>www.hans-w-koch.net
>
>
>
>
>
>Am 16.02.2011 um 18:31 schrieb microsound-request at or8.net:
>
>> Message: 4
>> Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:07:12 -0600
>> From: David Powers <cyborgk at gmail.com>
>> To: microsound at microsound.org
>
>> Subject: Re: [microsound] Exit Through the Gift Shop
>> Message-ID:
>>       <AANLkTin_iuD0o3jfhyskrGgJTiVcOsnF=PkJCsftxZYM at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
>>
>> A little food for thought:
>>
>> Do we not suffer from too much noise in our cities already? At least
>> in Chicago, I am subjected to large amounts of unwanted noise, whether
>> it is the dangerously loud sound of elevated trains, or the unwanted
>> (and almosty always terrible) background music that plays incessantly
>> indoors everywhere one goes.
>>
>> So I suggest that the ultimate sonic intervention would not create
>> noise, but SUBTRACT noise--creating an unexpected pocket of silence in
>> the midst of the city would be fantastic, in my opinion.
>>
>> ~David
>
>
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