Catalogue of Attributes exercise
A sound installation that has inspired (and awed me) multiple times is Zimoun’s unnamed piece for Le Centquatre, Paris 2017. While I have spoken about this on my blog before, this is a unique experiment for it.
Catalogue of its attributes
The boxes: There are 658 cardboard boxes in this piece, each with a motor and cotton ball to create sound. I believe the cardboard boxes were used for convenience, as they’re cheap, easy to purchase in bulk, collapsable for easier transporting, light and make a good sound when hit. Thinking of an alternative to cardboard boxes is quite hard, as they’re essentially perfect as they can even be painted if a different colour is desired.
The motors: There are 658 motors attached to the boxes with cotton balls on them. These motors don’t have to be powerful as the cotton balls they are spinning are extremely light. You could control all of these by adjusting the voltage, making them faster or slower depending on the desired timbre. The small motors used are perfect; as they’re powerful enough, are extremely light and have a small footprint.
The cotton balls: The 658 cotton balls are the main resonator, and are attached to the motors with a then metal wire. Each wire has been bent slightly to allow the ball to repeatedly hit the boxes. But because of this, each ball will be hitting the box at a different time due to slight differences, which changes the overall sound of the piece. While cotton balls work very well for this, any small ball-shaped object could resonate with the boxes as well, but would also change the sound. This is probably an artistic decision to get a more delicate sound which amplifies further with 658 of them.
The space: Le Centquatre is an art gallery located in Paris, France. It seems like this was on the main floor, with the boxes stacking up on 3 sides as high as they could. This is a huge space (39,000 m²) and a redeveloped funeral house (formerly known as d’Aubervilliers) originally built in 1874. Because of this, the acoustics in the space should amplify the sound as the reverb and glass roof keep all the sound in the building, creating a huge reverb.
The sound: Zimoun loves to create a tiny and simple sound played by hundreds of different instruments, and he does just that in this piece.
The logistics: While most of the exhibition can be folded up and is composed of many small objects, moving this around would take a long time, requiring multiple trips with vans. This is most definitely what was done, but would still take a long period of time to set up and pack away.
While this task asks me to now use this catalogue for my own work, I am confused about how to do that. Instead, I got inspired by diving into this piece.
For my tensegrity sculpture idea, I thought could use motors with exciters on them, similarly to Zimoun’s piece above, to excite the strings. If I had enough strings, it would result in a large cacophony, hopefully sounding good. I could upcycle old guitar strings to do this.