Dan Westlake
Audio
Art After Art
The Incubator Short performative Reading given by Dan Westlake at 'Banner Repeater' as part of Readings from The Dark Object with Katrina Palmer and guest speakers introduced by Jeremy Akerman
The Incubator
The Incubator was a site-specific collaboration with Sculptor/installation artist Emily Paige Short at Shunt. Shorts large kinetic monument dealt with relationship between technologic progress and organic growth. Westlake's sound piece, looping in roughly hourly cycles used a repeated 1 second loop put through a series of super low ands extreme high frequencies evoking a times thunderous rumble emerging from the bowls of the earth and at other times an electric rain storm feeding the land from which life can emerge (May 10)
1. The Incubator (excerpt) - (07:20)
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AtelierTransPal
AtelierTransPal was a site-specific installation conceived and supervised by Stefan Shankland. It was developed in parallel with an on-line project exploring the links between the pallet, the artist's studio and artistic practice in the public domain. A sculptural and architectural installation, on the Parade Ground, a 25 000 sq ft space, located between Tate Britain and Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, It was made of 2000 wooden pallets and was on site from October 31st to December 8th 2006. This 21m long, 4m high and 4m wide monumental stack of pallets was transformed into an open architecture to be used as a new set of project spaces by Chelsea College of Art and Design students. My response to the installation was informed by my continuing exploration of the nature of reality using time based media and an interest in the dichotomy between the (comparatively) solid nature of buildings and the transient nature of what goes on in and around them, the fact that many of the site now used by the art school has previously been used as both a prison and a hospital highlights this. The pallet exists in a space between solidity and fluidity being solid structures designed for perpetual motion.
The piece used two sound systems embedded in the structure approximately 8 meters apart. One played a continues looped rhythm track made out of sampled 'hard' noises from the construction of installation such as the hammering into place of the pallets and represented structure and solidity. The other sound system played a randomly ordered selection of ephemeral noises recorded during the construction, sounds such as snippets of conversation, the sound of the fork lift trucks and other transport moving around the sitez. Like a building being stable while other elements such as people move in and around it it was important that the rhythm track remained constant while the other track would never interact with it exactly the same way twice. For the sake of this CD a simulation of the original sound piece is realized by recording both the rhythm element and the ephemeral element onto the same track. The volumes of both the whole piece and the two separate elements fluctuate as they would when the piece is engaged with 'live' on site as the viewer walked to, from and around the structure. (Nov 06)
1. AtelierTransPal (excerpt) - (05:00)
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Cubism
An audio piece lasting 3:56 mins shown at the ‘This Way Up’ at Temporarycontemporary. A sound installation with accompanying video piece and plus text contextualising the relationship between the sound, exhibition space and video. This piece responded to a brief calling for entries to be submitted responding directly to the exhibition space. I choose to do this sonically, using mathematical formula to transfer the dimensions of the box structure used to dissect the space into sound, inspired by the (unatributed) quote ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’. I then made a video by re-mixing/ re-edited the archetects computer generated simulation of the original plans to accompany the sound element. (May 06)
"The structure of this piece of music is based on the numerical dimensions of the cuboid structure used to dissect the gallery space. The number of cuboids used by the structure is transferred to the number of bars used, the number of bars are then divided into 4 sections representing the number of different sizes of cuboids being used, the separate sections are then layered creating a sonic wall. The top layer consists of 60 measures representing the number of cuboids with the dimensions of 178 squared. This number is used o create an arpeggio with a play order of 1/7/8. The second layer of 57 bars reflects the number of boxes used with the dimensions 305 squared, this figure is used to create an arpeggio of 3/0/5. The 21 cuboids of 410 x 410 x 229 are represented by an arpeggio of 4/1/0 for the first 14 measures and then 2/2/8+1(9) for the last 7. The 2 bars representing the cuboids of 547 squared use an arpeggio of 5/4/7. The visual element accompanying this piece is in turn a visual response to the music, remixing the original virtual video presented by the designers of the structure at the beginning of the project."
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Untitled (Nothing)
The Sound of an empty studio. Recorded on the 4th floor, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, East Village, NYC. (May 07).