There has been radio silence from this blog for a week, partly because of life and partly because I didn’t want to think about the exhibition for a while. It didn’t turn out how I wanted it (the exhibition, not life) and although I have immersed myself in much more important things this week, it was kind of disappointing. Still, I am holding out the hope that by the end of the exhibition my original sounds will be installed, in which case I will have a Private View Take II and make an ‘official’ video which I will post in the next blog.

Here’s what happened…

On Monday morning, the second of the installation days, I went to visit Tom Fox at the school we teach at. He had been testing the Bela Mini overnight and while I was there did some further troubleshooting, to no avail. It looked like a fault with the sound board of the device. By now it was 9.30am, and he had a class at 10. Within this half hour, Tom fixed me up with a replacement sound system consisting of 8 individual sound boards which we had to quickly find simple 8-bit sounds for (the boards wouldn’t take my own sounds, sadly). The speed at which Tom works is absolutely phenomenal – by the end of the half-hour, I had a big box of pre-programmed sound boards and dozens of multi-coloured crocodile clips and as I left the room, there was a line of enthusiastic fourth-years ready to go in.

I went straight to Courtyard Arts and tried to remember what Tom had told me about creating a chain of sound boards and crocodile clips, with everything connected to everything else.

After a couple of hours of fiddling about pretending I knew what I was doing, some of the sounds were coming out of the sculptures, but not in any consistent way. There was an enjoyable metaphor to be found about connectivity, what with the multiple crocodile clips linked together at each node; however, I was much too grumpy to be enjoying metaphors. It pained me, but I needed help and asked Ben to come to my aid. It’s nothing to do with being a woman. It’s a lot to do with being a menopausal, brain-befuddled woman though. However, this may well be an example of a ‘gendered education gap’ (more on this later).

Ben did it. Finally, all the boards and connectors were crammed (carefully) inside a cable-management container (aka cardboard box).

There were quiet sounds, of sorts, emanating from the sculptures, and I had to content myself with the fact that there was sound at all.

The exhibition opened on the morning of the next day, Tuesday, and the private view was in the evening. It was a beautiful sunny evening, there was chilled white wine in the courtyard, and lots of my friends came. People seemed intrigued by the strangeness of the speaking sculptures, so I felt a bit better about the whole thing.

I’ll post more photos of the sculptures next time – including, with any luck, a video of the exhibition with my intended sounds issuing from the sculptures. We’re waiting on a replacement Bela Mini, which may arrive in time.

On Saturday, Tom Fox was involved in Hackoustic, a day of experimental sound performances and installations at Eklectic, a wonderful arts space in the middle of Waterloo – a little oasis of calm away from the business of the city, with plants, trees, a little bar and cafe, artists’ studios, the sounds of goats and pigs from the next door petting zoo, and a large hall which Tom says used to be a Buddhist monastery, now repurposed as an artspace. I now have a burgeoning interest in sound art and this seemed like a great opportunity to see what the possibilities are.

I looked around at people’s installations in the hall (including an interactive book of story and sound created by Tom Fox) and listened to a gig of the experimental sound artists Plink Plunk.

I’d signed up to a radio-building workshop as part of the day, with a group of creative practitioners called Shortwave Collective. They aim to make technological learning more inclusive and collaborative, to ‘de-mystify aspects of technology’ and to create a learning space with themselves as ‘equal non-experts’, leading to experimental and impromptu results. It sounded PERFECT for me. I’m definitely a living example of the ‘gendered education gap’. However, the concept of a crocodile clip is no longer as mystifying as it once was.

Each of us heard something different. I heard some snippets of music, and somebody else got football results on LBC. It was interesting; apparently, the best time to get a good signal from an open-wave receiver like this is to do it at dawn or dusk, when the ionosphere is at its most conducive (did you know that radio waves bounce off electrons in the ionosphere? Neither did I). The good thing about fine art is that you don’t have to understand something properly to make meaning out of it. An artist’s mind can go off at lateral tangents and end up with a new way of looking at a thing. That’s the theory at least.