"Sometimes sound summons the world with more certainty than my verse ...secretly, like twilight. The world seems lost in listening, trying to validate itself in each solitary sound." - Akio Suzuki
From 9 till 14 February we organise the Artefact festival for art & media at STUK in Leuven. One of the works presented in the exhibtion is the confronting Public Secrets of Sharon Daniel. This website provides an interactive interface to an audio archive of hundreds of statements made by current and former prisoners, which reveal the many secret injustices perpetrated by the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Visitors navigate a multi-vocal narrative that links individual testimony, public evidence and social theory, in order to challenge the assumption that imprisonment provides a solution to social problems.
There are secrets that are kept from the public and there are ‘public secrets,’ — secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself. The trick to the public secret is knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge.
In the United States the injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are ‘public secrets’. The public perception of justice relies on not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive social problems such as racism, poverty, addiction, and abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.
Some months ago Aernoudt Jacobs did a residency here at STUK working on his latest installation Permafrost, he also did a talk on the work at a previous Displaced Sounds evening. Last October he presented it for the first time at Vooruit’s Almost Cinema exhibition (where you could also experience the amazing ‘It’s in the Air‘ by Felix Hess). The final result was extremely beautiful. If you missed it in Ghent, you have another chance to see this quiet and mesmerizing work at Kaaitheater in Brussels from 24 till 27 november at their Burning Ice program.
Permafrost is an environmental sound sculpture about the freezing process of water. An installation has been developed in which we can observe the constantly repeated cycle of freezing and melting. By means of a custom-made sound apparatus the process is made audible. Permafrost deals with the sometimes paradoxical relation between nature and technique.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity.
The formation of ice (as a process) is a fascinating (sonic) experience. It allows the approach of matter transformation - liquid into solid - as a sonic process and to experience how in the end this inaudible process becomes perceivable to the audience. From a scientific point of view I want to research sound conductivity in changing matter - how the same sounds will change along with the consistency change of water. Ice, water and the different stages in between are an ideal platform for this research. Because of their physical qualities water and ice each have a different effect upon sound. This has to do with the speed of sound. The speed at which sound propagates itself through air is about 340m/s (i.e. If sound is produced 340m away it will be heard 1 second later). The speed of sound under water is of 1500m/s; 3 times faster than air. In ice this becomes about 3300m/s. This means that in ice sound reaches its destination 10 times faster than in air. Practically this also means that as matter changes the pitch of the sound will also change. The freezing process will thus produce sounds relating directly to the growth process of crystals.
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox.
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
“«Opera Calling» - is an artistic intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera. By means of an unknown number of audio bugs placed within the auditorium of the local opera house, the outside public is given access to the performances on stage. The performances are retransmitted to the public not through broadcasting, but by telephoning each person individually.
From March 9th to May 26th 2007, audio bugs, hidden in the auditorium, transmitted the performances of the Zurich Opera to randomly selected telephone land-lines in the city of Zurich. Over 90 hours of opera performances were retransmitted to 4363 households.
In proper style of a home-delivery-service, anyone that picked up their telephone, was able to listen to the on-going opera performances for as long as s/he wanted through a live connection with the audio bug signal. As soon as the listener would hang up, the telephone machine would call the next random number.
With the use of the telephone for the dissemination of the opera transmissions a virtual auditory space is opened not as blanket coverage (as with broadcasting media) but as a home-delivery service: Every person is individually connected and can eaves-drop at their leisure from the comfort of their living room.
Following Bell’s original intention for the use of the telephone, «Opera Calling» makes use of the telephone as a broadcasting media. It revalues this long-forgotten application, revealing how the telephone in its beginings was just an apparatus uncoupled from specific social use. The Opera works as a symbol for a closed-circuit cultural operating system which is opened up by connecting it to the a telephone network. By re-distributing the performance-output, normally contained within the physical walls of the Opera House, Opera Calling also askes questions of cultural ownership.
The project received wide media attention mainly locally, but also internationally. Through this, «Opera Calling» gained a third level of access:
People who were randomly called by the telephone machine had sometimes seen the project on television news and - thrilled to have been chosen by the machine - would call other members of the household to the phone, explaining to them the project. In some cases people would sit in groups in front of the telephone, listening to the opera, discussing the transmission, just as people probably had done one hundred years ago with the “Telefon Hirmondo”.
The media also informed the Zurich Opera about the project, by asking for a statement regarding «Opera Calling». After denying any involvement with the project, they sent a letter to both Cabaret Voltaire and !Mediengruppe Bitnik with the order to remove all hidden bugs, immediatly stop the transmissions, and threatening to file a law-suit.
There followed a debate in the media over cultural ownership which resulted in a David vs. Goliath style discussion about the flow of cultural subsidies. Finally the Zurich Opera decided to tolerate «Opera Calling» as a temporary enhancement of their performance repertoire.”
Japanese artist Yuri Suzuki thinks that graffiti and pirate radio are very much alike. “Both of these art expressions hack into public facilities. In the case of graffiti, the hacker uses the wall. In case of pirate radio, the hacker uses public radio waves illegally.
It can be said that pirate radio is sound graffiti and I would like to propose to combine these two methods of graffiti; the artist can spray a QR code (two-dimensional bar-code) in the street with a stencil. Then when people who find the graffiti take a snapshot of the code with a mobile phone they can find the radio station through the internet.
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It reminds me in some way of Paik’s Random Access Music. “Since the early 1950s, avant-garde composers have been using magnetic tape to obtain a spectrum of sounds far exceeding the canon of conventional instruments. Obviously, musical notation was worthless in such cases, and Cage developed randomly determined, graphical scores allowing various noises to be assembled into complex tape compositions. In this tape installation, Paik went one step further: the visitor can use the sound head, which has been detached from the tape recorder, to interactively run through the tapes glued to the wall, and constantly vary the sound sequence according to location and speed. This random access to the musical raw material enabled visitors to produce compositions of their own.” - from Media Art Net
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Another similar project is The Swipe Wall. A site-specific interactive media architecture for New York City subway stations that creates music and lights when people swipe their Metrocards through it. The large metallic plane is modeled with an intricate series of thin canals running the length of the corridor, most of them within hand’s reach. By inserting the card in these slits and swiping, sounds and lights are triggered.
Originally designed for the ramps of the West 4th and Union Square stations, the Swipe Wall could be deployed in any hallway of the subway network. These stations occupy large extents of space which serve no other purpose than traffic: this project transforms these transitory areas into places that provides commuters a creative outlet while on the go.
The second design goal was to subvert the functional role of the Metrocard as an utilitarian object, re-imagining it as a tool for expressive interactions within the original context of a public transportation environment.
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A few years ago Troika from UK gave a presentation on their work at the Artefact festival. An interesting one is the Tool for Armchair Activists, a device that speaks your txt’s out aloud. Troika teamed-up with Moritz Waldemeyer to create ‘The Tool For Armchair Activists’ - a machine for remote rants and protests. Designed to be strapped to lampposts in front of prominent buildings like the house of parliament, or other institutional buildings in front of which many protests occur ‘The Tool For Armchair Activists’ brings the voice of the people to The Man, all from the comfort of your living room. The concept offers a modern alternative to the speaker corner, and saves you the hassle of sitting in the rain waiting for your favourite MP to pass by.
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The ‘Sound Graffiti‘ is a simple electronic gadget you can build for yourself using old electronics and cheap kits. Connect the components, protect them with polyurethane foam and install them in the street. Record a message and let others record their own message. //// Vox Populi is an open source project based in DIY interaction designs to fight advertisement and corporate branding in our streets.////
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Some other musical / sound graffiti projects found on Regine Debatty’s blog we make money not art:
Audio Bombing, by Mike Fleming, Kang Chang and Kyle Millns from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, uses magnetic audio tape as its medium. Here’s how the system should work: after having recorded on a cassette any information you want, you remove the tape and cut out the segments to be used. Then take your tape segments and go tag whatever you want in urban space. You can listen to the tag by running an augmented playhead spray over the magnetic tape.
Since the graffiti is less visually obstrusive (a thin black strip), it can infiltrate spaces traditional graffiti can not such as office buildings, under tables, elevators, schools, coffee shops, etc.
The prototype consists of a hacked cassette player. The casing was removed, the play head dismantled from the circuit board to allow it to function externally.
The second project dealing with graffiti and sound is Chia-Ying Lee’s Sonic Graffiti: Spraying and Remixing Music on the Street. The system enables artists to create and geo-tag music in the urban space with real spray cans. A sound cap has to be snapped on the top of spray cans to spray out sounds and manipulate sound with gestures. A controller is used for listening to the music with earphones when creating, and positioning sounds. A recording part collects sound samples from the city, or records vocal performances.The guys from Audio Bombing were not arrived at STEIM yesterday when i looked for them so i don’t know how far they are in the implementation of their project. Chia-Ying Lee was there and explained me that she is going to do a trial of her tagging system at the end of June in Taipei.
- Regine / we make money not art
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one found on youtube:
This is a piece I installed in the bathroom at Parsons. I hacked the IR sensor on the faucet so that every time someone washed their hands, they got a light show and a sound clip played. I also left a record button under the sink so people could record new stuff.
In 2007 the British artist Hannah Rickards travelled to Alaska to interview people who claimed they had heard the aurora borealis, the coloured swathes of light made by charged particles in the polar atmosphere. Rickards’ work has dealt in the past with such transformations between categories of perception and representation – between the visual and the audible, for example, or the natural and the artificial – and the project that developed from this (… a legend, it sounds like a legend …, 2007) became an extraordinary process of reduction that recalls 1970s’ Conceptualism.
Rickards displayed three transcripts from her Alaskan interviews on monitors of red, green and blue in a solo show last year at The Showroom gallery in London, while recorded voices spoke the texts out loud. Rather than the drama and the mystification of the aurora borealis, the installation effected a precise visual mapping of the gallery space, with each corner determined by the constituent colours of a cathode ray, and thus the process of electrification of particles that results in both the Northern Lights and television images.
The tone of Rickards’ work differed markedly from the testimonies of those who claimed they had heard the light phenomenon. The subjects are enthralled with their encounter, or are on the defensive, constantly seeking to shore up their stories by relating their experience to something else: the sound was like ‘scratching’ or ‘a harp’, or ‘a sustained hum, like, um, like a lightsabre, you know, from Star Wars’, ‘a sheet of music’ or a Las Vegas hotel where ‘they do this symphony of lights where they have different, um, coloured lights, um, move to music’. One of the testimonies gave Rickards the (lengthy) full title of the show:
The sound I think it makes is, is that whispering sound, to me it sounds, it almost sounds, um, uh, what’s the word I’m thinking? Um, like historic, not historic, but, um, oh: a legend, it, it sounds like a legend, you know, when you think of a legend or something way back in the past you get that, that, it sounds like that to me, like this legend or somebody’s, this whispering sound: it’s a legend.
just saw an interesting post on cassette labels on Rhizome posted by Ceci Moss.
In the 1980s, cassette labels played a vital role in the distribution of underground music, most notably in the noise, industrial, and punk scenes of the time. Easy and relatively inexpensive to produce, cassettes became a common format for the circulation of music lacking popular appeal. Although the majors produced cassettes as well, many of the producers of these underground labels saw their DIY business model as a stance against the greed of the mainstream music industry. Connections made through distribution and information sharing among the artists and musicians in these circles helped to establish a network for those involved.
In the age of GarageBand, Myspace, and file sharing, it may come as a surprise to some that cassette labels are still very much in operation. Tapes now function as a basic form of patronage between musicians and their audience; since a physical format is no longer necessary to send or receive music, these objects become a gesture of support. Tapes act to make tangible the connection between a creator and their listeners, and the attentive and often handmade packaging speaks to this exchange. One instance of this relationship is revealed in the description provided for the Gilgongo Records “Singular Set” series, a run of cassette releases recorded directly onto the tape by the musician in an edition of one. Gilgongo’s James Fella explains that for the project, “…the emphasis is on reaching out and sharing something specific with one other person, that an unrepeated portion of time and creation was individually cut and passed on to one other person to hold onto as their own.”
Cassettes also yield a grainy, degraded sound quality, an aspect that has its own appeal. The draw to this sound can be read as a type of nostalgia, Paul Hegarty in “The Hallucinatory Life of Tape” writes:
Within the dying of media comes the passing or slow dying of individual units – tapes, records, cylinders, cartridges – all of which decay, and in so doing, seem to take on characteristics of having lived. Once digital media arrive as ‘other’, as cyborg sound, the analogue seems to breathe, however rasping the sound. Nostalgia and melancholy imbue formats in general and individual items with pneuma (the essential lifeforce or breath of everything in the universe, according to the Stoics).
Thus, the interest in cassette releases today can, in part, be understood as a response to the proliferation of digital media. Within the realm of experimental music, where the sonic and aesthetic attributes of technological decay hold a particular importance and history, one could argue that the current emphasis on cassette releases extends from this lineage, now only heightened by the influence and expanse of digital media. (Perhaps for this reason many of the labels below would fall under the “experimental” or “noise” category.)
In an effort to provide a snapshot of this active community, I’ve decided to compile a list of 101 contemporary cassette labels as a resource. Feel free to insert additional links in the comments field. - Ceci Moss on Rhizome
a few weeks ago I saw some audio tape flying around on a street in Brussels. must have been years since I last saw that. here are some cassette art works:
Lost Sound . video by John Smith and Graeme Miller . 1998-2001
Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative and musical connections between images and sounds linked by the random discovery of the tape samples.
“A lyrical and poignant response to the urban environment, Lost Sound depicts the city as a disparate and fragmented series of personal histories. A sense of migration, loss and displacement seeps through upbeat soundtracks from sunnier climes.” Helen Legg, Ikon Gallery Birmingham
“The theme of fragmentation and decay is taken up by my favorite work here, the video Lost Sound (2001), made in collaboration with sound artist Graeme Miller. Divided into short sections titled by location, Lost Sound shows discarded audiotapes around London — strands clinging to a fence, trapped in the crevices of a tree trunk, intertwined with weeds. The sound track combines the voices and songs on the found audiotapes with ambient sounds recorded on location. Visually the audiotapes tell us almost nothing; they must be “decoded” by the equipment that put them on the sound track. But we come to see that the signs, cars, and pedestrians in the videotape pose similar “decoding” problems: what do they mean, where do they come from, who are they? A city that at first seems comprehensible is revealed as a layering of mysteries; we know no more about the passing humans from their images than we do about what’s on the crumpled tapes. Each section charts a different relationship between tape and urban scene, taking the viewer on a little unpredictable journey. Finally, as happens so often in Smith’s work, the representational structure itself seems to break down. Titles and images are flipped left to right, undermining the readability of words, and men loading boxes onto a truck are seen in a repeated loop, foregrounding the arbitrariness of cinematic time as well as commenting on the repetitiousness of manual labor. Lost in an indecipherable maze whose rules change constantly, we see the city as a network of unpredictably shifting relationships and come to doubt even the sounds encoded in the tape fragments.” Fred Camper ’Chicago Reader’ 2001
Songs of the Islands was made in New York City in 1996 when I noticed the quantity of discarded, loose audio cassette tape tangled in gutters, subway grills and traffic islands, and decided to start collecting it. The collection took several months and yielded tape fragments with all sorts of music, including rap, Vietnamese pop music, heavy metal, reggae, traditional Indian music and salsa. There were also non-musical discoveries, such as an episode of “All in the Family” recorded ambiently in a room with a bird chirping, and outtakes from a radio journalist’s interview with a psychic. In their stylistic variety and linguistic diversity, these soundtracks describe the astounding mix of people living in New York.
During the course of a six-week car trip through Europe in 1997, I decided it would be interesting to try the same experiment as I did for Songs of the Islands and collect any discarded audio tape I found on the ground. New York is a particularly dirty city, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to find any tape in EuropeÑperhaps it gets cleaned up more quickly there? As it turned out, I found tape in every one of the ten countries I visited. I collected, cleaned and subsequently spliced together the pieces of tape in the order and lengths in which I found them. The sound was then transferred to CD, and worked into an interactive wall installation. Each original piece of loose tape is displayed under a plastic dome, with a base made from section of a European map corresponding to the city where that tape fragment was found.
Aki Onda uses field-recordings obsessively collected over a span of two decades to create a 4-hour long sound diary. He considers these recordings to be personal memories, composes by manually manipulating cassette players, re-collecting and re-constructing concrete sounds. What emerges is a sonic collage of ritualistic tape music.
Graham Dolphin’s work appropriates objects and icons of the fashion and music industries, reforming them into assemblages that reveal the obsessions and formulas underwriting the temporal world of mass culture. Text works include: every lyric from the Beatles back catalogue hand written over the iconic cover of the White Album. In another text work, Dolphin takes every word from a single issue of Vogue and scripts them onto a single page, which has the same dimensions of the magazine. These compulsive actions transform and disrupt the surface aspirations of popular culture and the glamour industry.
The innovative audio cassette-magazine Audio Arts was established by Bill Furlong in 1973. Edited and produced by Furlong, it comprises an integral element of his art practice.
The idea of Audio Arts arose out of conversations between two young artists, William Furlong and Barry Barker, in the early 1970s. Its publication was a part of the conceptual experimentation taking place within the contemporary art of the time.
Since its inception in 1972, Audio Arts has grown to become the world’s most comprehensive and coherently focused sound archive of artists’ voices as well as sound art. The cassette-magazine has been in continuous and regular publication for thirty-five years, with over twenty-five volumes of four issues each. The archive itself (currently amounting to over 200 boxes) contains all of the unedited master tapes of recordings undertaken for the magazine.
The archive was presented at Tate in 2007. You can listen to some excerpts here
at Vooruit arts centre on the 8th of October 2009 Cinéma Invisible (by Heleen Van Haegenborgh, Jürgen de Blonde, Lander Gyselinck, Kristof Roseeuw, Jasper Rigole & Kelly Schacht) was presented:
With the arrival of CDs and mp3s, the glory days audio cassettes seem well behind us. However, old, self-made tapes remain a must-have for many a music lover. Pianist Heleen Van Haegenborgh, up-and-coming drummer Lander Gyselicnk, double bass player Kristof Roseeuw and electronica artist Jürgen De Blonde, a.k.a. Köhn still cherish the magic of the audiotape.
For their Cinéma Invisible project, Van Haegenborgh and her colleagues work with old audiotapes from the archive of visual artist Jasper Rigole. His ‘International Institute for The Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of Other people’s Memories’ is a continuously expanding multimedia archive of found private documents.
For Cinéma Invisible, the musicians work with private recordings of, for example, a holiday. They create an audio drama, a film without pictures, where the audio material forms the basis for the musical improvisation. The musicians focus on the relation between text, music and silence as well as on the images that these convey. Visual artist Kelly Schacht takes care of the set design.
Schizophonia [= that which makes dogs bark at speakers, children look for the man behind the box and savages demand their captured souls returned.]
At the next edition of Artefact media art festival (9>14 feb 2010), Swiss artist Erik Bünger will do a live presentation of his performance/lecture/video a lecture on schizophonia.
‘Schizophonia’ is a term originally coined by R Murray Schaefer to describe the nervous split that is created when sound is separated from its source.
a lecture on schizophonia is a very interesting stream of ideas and associations, from David Lynch (Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway), Woody Allen dubbed in foreign languages, The Exorcist, Celine Dion, Barack Obama to Natalie and Nat King Cole, dealing with recorded & recording media, death and ghosts.
Tech magazine Wired published a list of the weirdest ways todays music is distributed and packaged towards their fans. From Max Tundra’s Kosher Chicken Soup to a wearbale T-shirt format or FM3s Buddha Machine.
From 9 till 14 February we organise the Artefact festival for art & media at STUK in Leuven. One of the works presented in the exhibtion is the confronting Public Secrets of Sharon Daniel. This website provides an interactive interface to an audio archive of hundreds of statements made by current and former prisoners, which reveal the many secret injustices perpetrated by the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Visitors navigate a multi-vocal narrative that links individual testimony, public evidence and social theory, in order to challenge the assumption that imprisonment provides a solution to social problems.
In the United States the injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are ‘public secrets’. The public perception of justice relies on not acknowledging that which is generally known. When faced with massive social problems such as racism, poverty, addiction, and abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.
Permafrost is an installation addressing in the first place the freezing process of water. At the core of Permafrost is a silent machine producing sounds according to her specific condition: the crystallization process becomes the sound source, the matter outgrowing its container becomes visible and tangible (the expansion of ice compared to the water volume is more than 9%). Due to this visual aspect Permafrost is much more a sound sculpture than a mere installation. Different contemporary media are combined in the installation: sound art, kinetic art, sculpture and new technologies. The physic laws of our environment and my fascination for the human perception are an endless source of reflection and creativity. 
Permafrost focuses on a central question in my work: how can the complexity, richness and stratification of our direct, daily environment be translated into something that can really be experienced? How can an environmental installation reach a beholder in the most efficient manner? What perceptual conditions can I design to yield specific experiences? What does this tell us about our perception in general? Our experience is always biased by our own structure (our body of experience). Francisco J. Varela writes in his book “The Tree of Knowledge”: We do not see the ’space’ in the outside world, but we experience it through our own representational space… We cannot just separate the biological and sociological background of our actions from the way in which the world presents itself to us. We don’t hear “frequencies”, we experience them. Sound is always coloured, not only by form but also by the different layers of meaning we extract from our own experiential background. With Permafrost I research the relation between sound and frequencies by investigating how frequencies, not perceivable by the human ear, still can yield sonic processes which will reach the perceptive scope of the listener. My fascination with reproducing the sound of this process concurs with the paradoxical relationship between technology and nature. This confronted me with ecological issues such as global warming and especially its effects on the melting process of the (former) permafrost, the ice caps that cover the Arctic and the Antarctic. Permafrost sensibilises the visitor about these issues. The technologies to produce Permafrost, is an actor of this paradox. 
For the cooling installation the most advanced technological options have been evaluated and realized in cooperation with the University of Diepenbeek, Industrial Sciences and Technology department. They have the necessary international know-how concerning cooling systems. For this installation (machine) a completely new self generating cooling system was designed. A block of ice is produced in a visible way (a 3 hour proces). And it all needed to happen silently. The core concept behind the technology of the cooling unit was to design a system that was highly efficient in its use of energy. It has become a fragile system that is in a equilibrium. Almost a ‘perpetuum mobile’. The energies (warmth) that the unit uses to generate the freezing proces are reversely used to apply the melting process.
Another similar project is 
A few years ago 
The ‘
Rickards displayed three transcripts from her Alaskan interviews on monitors of red, green and blue in a solo show last year at The Showroom gallery in London, while recorded voices spoke the texts out loud. Rather than the drama and the mystification of the aurora borealis, the installation effected a precise visual mapping of the gallery space, with each corner determined by the constituent colours of a cathode ray, and thus the process of electrification of particles that results in both the Northern Lights and television images. 
just saw an interesting 
Surface Spoils: Concrete Music from Europe . 
Cassette Memories . 
With the arrival of CDs and mp3s, the glory days audio cassettes seem well behind us. However, old, self-made tapes remain a must-have for many a music lover. Pianist Heleen Van Haegenborgh, up-and-coming drummer Lander Gyselicnk, double bass player Kristof Roseeuw and electronica artist Jürgen De Blonde, a.k.a. Köhn still cherish the magic of the audiotape.
Schizophonia [= that which makes dogs bark at speakers, children look for the man behind the box and savages demand their captured souls returned.]
