consept for »sale away« – at the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrueck 21 April-23 May 2004.
Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity.
Rem Koolhaas, Shopping (Harvard Project on the City), in: Mutations The street-galleries are a mode of internal communication which would alone be sufficient to inspire disdain for the palaces and great cities of civilisation.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Ever since Walter Benjamin‚s description of the flaneur in the Paris arcades, the complex interchanges between consumer culture and art have become an issue worthy of discussion.

We will make an installation in a empty store in the public space of the shopping streett, accessible for all, were people pass by, come to look at things and to themselves or to others.
In this situation of passivity we want to get people's attention and invite them to play.
In order to do so we will install and display a complex mechanical sound orchestra and give peole in the street the chance to play with it.
This will be possible simply with their mobile phones, as an every day widely used device, (what naturally was changing from the private to the public space in the last time.)
The mechanical orchestra will consist of a wide range of staalplaat soundsystem typical musicians, like flute, organ and brass playing vacuum cleaners, rattling kitchen mixers, buzzing ventilators, radio playing toy trains, wobbling jigsaws, dancing tumble dryers, humming refrigerators and other misused household utilities, you might also find in a normal shopping window.
One central element will be a big man-size refrigerator, the conductor.
This fridge is also the explanatory interface.
In order to start the orchestra and wake up the shopping windows one person has to dial in the system (the number and the simple commands are displayed on the window).
With this call he opens the door of the fridge, giving free the image of his explanatory interface "person" .
This person will explain and invite him to act, a start command can be given for the big toy train to start moving and playing a basic melody via the loaded radios.
Now, he can play his orchestra.
Simply with the number keys of his phone he can let all different instruments play along with the melody. (For simplicity's sake we will have 9 groups of instruments, or call it voices.)
He can set some single voices or the whole orchestra tutti.
Once he has activated all instruments he will also be able to switch the triggering melody of the train via his phone.
He can play around as long as he is willing to pay hfor the telephone call (what makes sure that not a single user will play too long and block the streering.)
The staalplaat soundsystem orchestras have efficiently proven their capability to attract different people of all ages even without a participatory element in the past.
In addition, the decontextualisation of every day household utilities causes pleasant surprise and talkative reaction from the audience. Staalplaat Soundsystem will be Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL) and Carsten Stabenow (GER) Olaf Matthes (GER).

The installation as shown in at theEMAF and the Tschumipavijloen in Groningen