ARCHITONE
Under the name of Architone , Staalplaat Soundsystem has begun a new series of projects where we explore the possibilities of transforming a public space in to a sonic art object.
Architone was first developed for the Siemens Arts Programme in collaboration with BMB Con in Kiel presented at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival where we converted the Kunsthalle into an instrument. Its similar incarnation was presented with Mark Bain in Graz at the Steirischer Herbst and ORF Musikprotokol. The second Architone converted a public park into orchestra for the Tuned City Festival in Berlin, and then the Central train station in Den Haag into a living mixer for train and station sounds for the Today’s Art Festival.
Architone is set of ideas applied to real spaces and investigates questions such as:
“How can sound art “play” public space as if it is a instrument.”
“How can you hear the its character and function through its dimensions and material?”
“How can the sound performance alter our sense of the potential scale for sound art.”
“Can a composition approach the scale of energy, and physical impact of noise already in effect in our sound producing cities. ”
Architone is very much in a development state and to answer these new questions we do our projects as live experiments and are in collaboration with universities, architects and other Artist active and experienced in this veiled.
For the first “Architone” in Kiel we created unique instrument/machines to produce physically powerful sound waves such that the entire building became acoustically resonant, tangible, and alive. The audience inside was able to hear the entire construction through its layers of walls and ceilings. We used many Architectural elements as sound devices, transforming windows and glass walls into loudspeakers and the floors in resonant chambers.
For the Tuned City Festival in Berlin we applied the Architone ideas to a public park under the name of Composed City, a co-production of Lola landscape architects and Staalplaat. Bringing the two disciplines of landscape architecture and sound art together, we worked to analyze and develop public space acoustically using the energy and motion already present. This included converting public barbeque grills into pipe organs, acoustically amplifying the natural sounds of basketball play and amplifying the sounds of everything from passing trains to small flies.
For the Today’s Art festival in Den Haag, in collaboration with Mike Reinirse, Erik Hobijn and Mark Bain, we applied Architone principles to the Den Haag Central train-station. To explore the train station sound as a source and control and transform it into an new instrument, we used the back and forth movement of as the faders for the mixing of 10 train horns and station sounds.
The Staalplaat Soundsystem is now working on a new Architone project developed for the Indian Khoj - International Artists Association in New Delhi.
The incredible volume and size of Indian traffic, and the sounds it produced is our inspiration. One prominent inhabitant of this mobile city is a small vehicle similar to the Tuktuk called the Auto. The Auto is a tiny 3 wheeled green and yellow taxi that is only large enough for two passengers and a driver. The Auto inhabits the city by the thousands, at times swarming the street like insects. Their communication language is by car horn much, signaling with it, much the way we use car signal lights here in Europe. Applying the Architone practice we seek to intercept this phenomenon of car signaling and overlay it within a meaningful structure.
Our idea is to hire with 30 of the Auto’s and to remotely trigger their horns as they drive along a programmed route. Using the taxis and their horns as choir it will be a combination of voice patterns and dynamic spatial movements creating sound choreographs. This taxi horn experiment hopes to engage on a large scale with the relationship between discrete signals and generalized noise, The première is presented in August at the India Art Summit.
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