When our group was first confronted with this task we decided to explore the campus in search of an area we could respond to and formed a discussion around our initial ideas.
Our very first idea was to use the lecture theater, with the thought that we could use the pre-existing sound and video equipment to create an extremely immersive experience. This idea was based around interpreting the view of hoards of students rolling into the theater as a sort of 'march of the drones' scene. Before this idea really got off the ground, it was quickly shut down by the difficulty involved in booking the theater around other classes.
Some secondary ideas involved the library, this is a space with a lot of restrictions, especially regarding sound. We began to draw up plans on how we could disrupt the aurally neutral atmosphere of the library, an installation in which our options were reserved to pretty subtle techniques. We discussed installing various hidden speakers around the seating areas which would play disruptive sounds like coughing, sneezing, farting and 'shhh-ing' in an anonymous, yet very deliberate manner. This was a good idea in theory and it didn't take itself too seriously either, sort of like a candid-camera / jackass style work, however the space itself was quite uncooperative. Obviously we wanted the speakers to be spread widely throughout the space and remain unseen, with power-points and ways to hide speaker wires without digging up the carpet being scarce, it soon became an impossibility.
Secondly, people in the library are generally there for decent amounts of time, after hearing 2 or 3 suspicious sounds, it wouldn't take much for someone to look around and notice some red and black wires running around the place. Essentially, once the presence of this installation is realised, its effect is lost.
On the ground level of the building, we started to investigate the old pressing table/mechanism area outside the sculpture department. We found this space to have an interesting dynamic; it spends most of the year being dark, dusty and unused aside from the odd sculpture display that it plays host to about once or twice a semester. The walls of rusted tins are in themselves a seemingly seldom acknowledged artwork by Lucia Usmiani.
This space already had a strong demeanor as it was. To avoid over-saturating the space and ultimately confusing the mood, we wanted to keep things as simple as possible, aiming to only extend the presence of this space by making the light (or lack thereof) under which we viewed this space more prominent.
It is essentially a Dead Space. It serves no current purpose and yet it remains. It is a dark, aged, splintered and ultimately hostile space, it has a sense of imminence. I found this space to have an interesting aural dynamic as well, from here you can here the muffled pitches of woodwork machines from behind closed doors and the fluctuating bustle that reverberates throughout the neighbouring stairwell.
In creating the sound component for our installation, I wanted to reflect these characteristics. Using my home studio I created a sound-scape that involves a lot of different sounds recorded from around the space itself using portable recording equipment (mostly a Zoom H2), the rest were created in the studio environment, designed to highlight certain aspects of the space.
The final mix comprises of these basic elements; there are 2 tracks of sounds recorded within the space itself, these include some faint machine noise from the furniture design area and some atmospheric recordings of the echoing stairwell, these are low in the final mix and are designed to make direct links to the space itself. There are 2 more ambient tracks recorded in the studio environment, which include wind sounds and a machine buzz using an old amplifier with a worn overdrive circuit, this buzz was extremely prominent in earlier mixes but has been reduced in the final product, it is a constant pitch designed to add a sense of discomfort. After a strong ambient base had been formed, I added one electric guitar track, mostly scratchy noise with delay, this track only really emerges from the others towards the end of the track where some pitch bending comes in, this track was to highlight the 'spooky' side of the space (related to some ghost stories which are apparently tied in with the space) and finally, the most dominant track uses a lightly distorted bass guitar, with plenty of reverb, a swelling yet relentless stroke pattern and an equalisation that is very low-frequency dominant, this aims to boost the ominous demeanor of the space to a level which is no longer ignorable.
-rjilynch / 080176
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