“Free Evenings and Weekends” by Benj Gerdes, Scott Pagano, Jennifer Hayashida

Exhibiting Artist(s):

• Benj Gerdes
• Scott Pagano
• Jennifer Hayashida

WIRELESS EXPERIENCE INSTALLATION

In Free Evenings and Weekends, CLN SWP seeks to create a site-specific sound performance for Max/MSP, audience participation, and cellular phones. The project acknowledges a reorganization of contemporary urban space/ soundscapes at the hands of widespread cellular phone use by initiating a series of chance operations which “instrumentize” the performer’s mobile phones.

A series of homemade, mobile phone activity detectors serve as triggers controlling a Max/MSP program. These devices monitor -handshakes” between handheld units and transmitter towers when a call is placed or received. The installation is dependent on mobile phone activity to generate audio, and without signal activity on the frequencies used by GSM phones it would remain silent. This serves to underscore a current fact of the “wireless revolution”: that it is in the hands of those who can afford it.

The audio program in Max/MSP consists of a series of voice recordings that make up a non-ordered glossary of terms which are neither Swedish nor English, but a mutation of both languages. The intention here is to render audible all that which is normally silent the signal rather than the ring, etc.) and subvert the standard hierarchy for “Listening” to/for one’s phone in terms of static/noise rather than message.

CLN SWP is a recently-formed artists’ collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their projects involve collaborative work with a political emphasis between visual artists and writers who work with film, video, text, installation, and performance.