Ian Andrews: In a Few Seconds Across the Ocean


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Title:


    In a Few Seconds Across the Ocean

Artist(s) and People Involved:


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Artist Statement:


    In a Few Seconds Across the Ocean refers to, and interrogates a number of references from 20th century art that might broadly be described as “a poetics of wireless technology,” ranging from the Futurist poetry of Marinetti to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1966 work Hymnen: anthems for electronic and concrete sounds.

    Following Marconi’s 1909 invention of wireless telegraphy, a plethora of poetic texts influenced by this new science appeared across Europe. Wireless communication, became an aesthetically determining factor, in both poetic form and content. This work utilises a generative techniques (random number generation, permutative structures, and graphics/sound interaction) to produce aleatory music, graphics and text based around these writings. The piece plays in a Loop that never repeats in the same way, and the generative structure is designed to create a multi-channel sound environment where the randomisation of the process distributes the different sound elements throughout the space.

    In a Few Seconds Across the Ocean attempts to go beyond the uncritical (re}production of modernist themes and aesthetics (singularity, purity, form over content) which have become all to common in sound work. Instead it seeks to interrogate modernist aesthetics from a standpoint which is hybrid, fragmented, culturally dispersed and informed by post-modern (inter)textuality. It attempts to displace the idealist opposition of divine, or natural writing (‘Words in Freedom’), over human finite inscription, which characterises many of the Constructivist and Futurist texts, instead, shifting the Formalist concept of ‘poetic language’ towards noise and difference.

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