A Touch of Code - Interactive Installations and Experiences (available on amazon USAand UK.)

Publisher Gestalten writes: Thanks to the omnipresence of computers, cell phones, gaming systems, and the internet, a broad audience has traded its past reservations against technology for an almost insatiable curiosity for all things technical. Against this background, unprecedented new tools and possibilities are opening up for the world of design. In addition to sketchbooks and computers, young designers are increasingly using programming languages, soldering irons, sensors, and microprocessors as well as 3D milling or rapid prototyping machines in their work. The innovative use of powerful hardware and software has become affordable and, most of all, much easier to use. Today, the sky is the limit when it comes to ideas for experimental media, unconventional interfaces, and interactive spatial experiences.

The comprehensive spectrum of innovative spatial and interactive work in A Touch of Code reveals how technology is fundamentally changing and expanding strategies for the targeted use of architecture, art, communication, and design for the future.

Daniel Schulze, Bitsbeauty, For Those Who See

New media art, interaction design, digital art, communication design, interface design, art&tech, etc. Define them as you like, the works in this book celebrate, in an unfussy, feisty way, the emancipation of computer code from the hands of programmers.

A Touch of Code takes a snapshot of the state of interactive art and design right here right now. If you're looking for a book with historical context and a panorama of what is going on all over the world this might not be the book for you. The works covered are very recent, there's no date next to the title of the pieces selected but i'd say that very few -if any- of them were developed more than 10 years ago. Most of the works were created in the USA or in Europe. With a surprisingly high emphasis on works from German-speaking countries. Which is fine by me, i don't tend to follow German magazines and blogs so i'm often in the dark as to what artists and designers are doing over there.

The book doesn't embarrass itself with much text. There's an introduction by Joachim Sauter from ART+COM, another one by the editors of the book. Other than that, all you get is the usual description of the works and a few lines that comment each chapter (Look, Touch, Explore, Engage and Intervene.)

Still, A Touch of Code is a joy to pore over. It's like a fast, efficient and snazzy blog about interactive installations. The images are fantastic, the design is impeccable, I discovered many young artists and designers (i was actually appalled by the extent of my ignorance) and felt the need to reconnect with artists i had not seen in ages.

Take a look at some of the goods you'll find in the book:

Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, 365 Knitting Clock

Siren Elise Wilhelmsen 365 Knitting Clock that knits 48 meshes per day, and produces one two meter long scarf per year. Knitting 24 hours a day, and a year at a time as a physical manifestation of time, they knit one mesh every half hour all day long, and in a year they each produce a two metre long scarf.

By the end of the year the yarn can be changed and a new year - and a new scarf - can begin.

Kathrin Stumreich, Fabricmachine

Kathrin Stumreich's Fabricmachine is a loop-based musical instrument that transforms the opacity, quality and weaving technique of the textile into audio signals.

Cod.Act, Cycloïd-E. Image copyright Xavier Voirol

Cycloïd-E is a sound sculpture composed of five horizontally-articulated tubes which swing in unpredictable patterns and produce musical tones. Each section of the armature is a different instrument that emits a sound dictated by its position and speed of movement. The video of the work in action is impressive.

Mischer Traxler, Till You Stop

Mischer Traxler, Till You Stop

Mischer'Traxler's cake decoration machine is made of a rotating platform, icing gun, a motor-run arm and a silver dragées spout. The machine perpetually repeats one production step, first the icing lines then the sugar beads, as the cake rotates. It goes on until the customer stops the process.

Felix Voerreiter, txtBOMBER

txtBOMBER by Felix Voerreiter generates on the fly and prints out political statements using an Arduino processor and seven markers.

Julius von Bismarck & Richard Wilhelmer & Benjamin Maus, Fühlometer, 2008. Photo: Julius von Bismarck

Fühlometer, by Richard Wilhelmer, Julius von Bismarck and Benjamin Maus, draws a luminous emoticon over the Berlin sky. A software reads emotions out of the faces of random Berliners, the system processes the resulting mood data and turns it in real time into this gigantic smiley.

Thibault Brevet , Self-Made Carbon-Copy Paper Printer

The Self-Made Carbon-Copy Paper Printer is the result of two constraints: no original and no traditional printing method. The printer was hand-made using carbon copy paper. The software was developed for the printer using processing to read the bitmat image and control an Arduino driver. Wherever there is a black dot on the bitmap image, the printer-head hits the paper, leaving a mark. The printer's hardware and software solutions reference the work of do-it-yourself and maverick open-source communities.

Three Pieces, which was housed during several weeks in Victorian Palm House of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, is a robot that plays the traditional Chinese dulcimer with its many bamboo fingers while the surrounding foliage hides an ensemble of robotic chimes. The robot performers, which are connected together, are conducted by the living and ever changing elements in the Palm House: moisture content of the soil, plants, temperature, animals, visitors.

Joseph . L Griffiths, Drawing Machine #1 (To Your Heart's Content)

Joseph . L Griffiths 's Drawing Machine #1 (To Your Heart's Content) is a stationary bike with a spinning front wheel that powers an apparatus that draws circles on the surface using coloured markers. Meanwhile, another drawing element makes other doodles based on the side to side motion of the handle bars.

Views inside the book:

ASPECT Magazine releases periodically DVDs documenting works by 5-10 artists working in new or experimental media. The videos of the pieces can be viewed in their original version or accompanied by the audio commentary of an expert. The commentators usually start with a description of the work then they go deeper by bringing the work in the broader context of history/art history/history of technology, by revealing anecdotes about the career of the artist, by explaining the technological challenges of the work or highlighting the issues the artist wanted to raise.

This week, i've been watching Volume 16: Lo-tech and Volume 17: Hi-Tech. The first presents nine artists who work with basic, or in some cases antiquated technology. As its name indicates, its 'hi-tech' counterpart features ten artists working at the intersection of new ideas in art and technology.

There were only a few names that were familiar to me in Lo-tech and Hi-tech and that's good, i'm all for discovering new artists. One of the reasons of my ignorance might be that i tend to be a little too enwrapped in Europe and most of the artists and commentators in both volumes are North Americans (one notable exception is Arie Altena presenting with his delightful Dutch accent Marnix De Nijs's Beijing Accelerator.)

I'll just highlight a work that blew me away. Nikhil Murthy's video Two Crashes (1926/2007) juxtaposes special effects that were regarded as "high tech" at the beginning of the 20th century to what was considered "high tech" at the beginning of the 21st. The first film is Buster Keaton's The General (1926) that shows the most expensive stunt of the silent era: a real wood burning steam locomotive driven onto the burning bridge, where it collapses. The second scene shows the spectacular crash of a real Porsche Carerra GT in the film Redline (2007).

The artist slowed-down and sped-up the video extracts according to data from two notorious stock market crashes: the ones of 1929 and 2008. The two clips are then edited together by rapidly flashing between the two films. Because of their differing speeds different combinations are seen throughout the video. It is always the same scenes, there are only two of them, yet the construction of the ensemble is mesmerizing. What is most annoying however is that i can't find the video online, just the extract on ASPECT's website.

New media art can do with it as much introspection and analysis as it can get and ASPECT does that in a very approachable yet precise and professional way.

Image on the homepage: Stephen Vitiello, Something Like Fireworks, 2010.
Previously: Magazine review: ASPECT - The Chronicle of New Media Art.

Robotik Room

It was time i'd interview Niklas Roy! Jonah Brucker-Cohen had a fantastic talk with him for gizmodo but that was 4 years ago. And there are video portraits about Niklas Roy online but there are in a language i can't quite master. Niklas is one of the most facetious characters of the 'new media art' world. His dance machine without 'annoying Dj", moving curtain, 'distributed' fountains, white cube gallery in a box, physical teapot inside a Commodore cabinet or his electromechanical version of the game Pong are certainly witty, absurd and at times, even hilarious. But don't let the jesting fool you. Behind the playfulness of Roy's machines, lay much irony and lucidity about the world of art & tech he belongs to.

My Little Piece of Privacy

Privéfonteintjes

Hi, Niklas! Why do you feel the need to invent 'useless things'?

Well, I guess that engineers and designers which usually invent machines and devices mainly do that in order to solve a problem with their inventions. Or they want to make an existing process more efficient with the help of technology. But such efficiency-driven approaches exclude a vast field of possible inventions. I find it very interesting to explore this field as it promises to be very free.

Do you really believe that your works are useless?

Somehow, my creations often end up in art exhibitions. So the question is, how useless is art? I strongly believe that art is useful for the health of society in some sort of balancing way. From that point of view, my machines might be a bit useful.

WIA < > WIA - Water in Africa < > Water in Austria

It is a bit daunting to interview you. I'm not sure i can trust any of your answers. Especially after having had a look at the WIA < > WIA project for which a fictitious African artist set up an installation that consisted of a public toilet in Linz, that appeared to be hooked up via Internet to an African village's well. Why did you chose to trick ars electronica? Was it really a spoof? Surely they must have known there was something fishy in the work?

Ars Electronica is the leading Media Arts institution. Their pole position makes them define trends and create hypes. Unfortunately, I often cannot agree to those hypes - which feeds the rebel in me.

Melissa's - let's call it 'performance' - started when Ars Electronica released a 'call for proposals' for an exhibition as part of Linz' culture capital program. This open call was more or less a very clear wish list of what they'd like to show. This open call would have made a good briefing for companies which focus on designing interactive installations. But it was not suitable to address artists which should stimulate the society by expressing their own positions. My application as African artist Melissa Fatoumata Touré began as a little fun experiment. I submitted precisely what Ars Electronica asked for and spiced it up with some toilet humour. I wanted to know how they'd react to such a rather ridiculous submission. It worked out far better than I thought: As I heard later, Melissa's toilet project was the first that got accepted by the jury - and they were even a bit sad that the other submissions didn't even come close to the 'quality' of Melissas proposal. Well, this is what the jury said.

To answer your last two questions: As far as I know, the organizers really had no clue what was going on until Melissa presented her work via Skype and with a live video broadcast from her uncle's internetcafé in Africa. That happened about three weeks after the opening of the exhibition, as far as I remember. But you should not forget that they've never seen Melissa before this presentation. It was all organized just via email and phone calls. There was a lot of imagination involved. On both sides actually: I also could just imagine what the organizers in Linz would think about Melissa. And during the long process of preparing the exhibition and the installation, I often had the feeling that Ars Electronica wouldn't believe Melissa's identity anymore and that they're already playing with me.

WIA < > WIA - Water in Africa < > Water in Austria

I like your explanation of why Melissa is 'the perfect dream of every new media curator.' And i couldn't help but smirk at 'her ideas are distilled media art mainstream.' Could you elaborate on this? What are 'distilled media art mainstream' ideas? Do i perceive a certain disenchantment/fatigue with media art theories and ideas? Or am i completely wrong?

I'm not even sure if ideas and theory play such a big role if you want to become successful in this field. Here are some simple lessons that I've learned so far:

1st: Don't be an artist. You should be an architect or have a background in biology, or something else more or less unrelated. Melissa was actually a computer scientist. Talking about Melissa: Your gender also plays a role. Being a woman beats being a man, as women are extremely underrepresented in this field.

2nd: No matter what you're really up to, I can recommend you to also make some experimental electronic music. This adds an interesting layer to your personality. Your level of musicality doesn't matter as that's the point where the experimental part starts.

3rd: Buzzwords and -topics are your friends and your source of inspiration. You might consider to become active in the fields of biotech, sustainability or, of course, Facebook.
[Edit: I just learned that from Ars Electronica's press release that Paolo will receive an Award of Distinction this year for his project 'Face To Facebook'. So maybe Facebook as an inspiring buzz topic might not work in the future anymore. And, congratulations Paolo!]

Vektron Modular

You explain that you created the Vektron modular because sometimes you need to listen to some strange zoundz. That sounds (to me at least) like a lot of work just for the sake of listening to some strange zoundz. I was wondering how often you create a work just for your own amusement. How much are you influenced by the possible feedback from public, the future reaction of the audience during the creative process? Do you give it much importance when you are developing a new work?

Building this synthesizer was actually an attempt to add an interesting layer to my personality. But I didn't want to write it so clear on my webpage, as this would have caused the reverse effect. Ok, now serious: I regard the development of things like this experimental Synthesizer as both, spare time fun and hands on research. I do that as often as possible as it often leads me to new ideas. The hard thing is actually to organize life an a way that you have so much spare time where you can work really free.
When I develop little personal devices like the Vektron, I really don't care about audience. But if it's about developing interactive installations, I certainly think a lot about mechanisms of human behaviour in advance. Many of those human reactions are quite predictable and the more you think about them in advance, the better an installation will work at the end.

Reinventing the Television - A workshop of Niklas Roy at the C:art:media program at Konsthoegskolan Valand, Goeteborg

I was very impressed by the little video documenting the Reinventing Television workshop you headed a the Valand Art School in Gothenburg. Can you take us through a couple of projects that turned old tv sets into 'storytelling machines'?

This was really a nice workshop. Anna Kindvall, one of the directors of Malmö's Electrohype biennial was teacher there at that time and invited me. The idea was to take old TV's and build new machines inside or with them. I often built TV's out of cardboard boxes when I was a child and don't get me wrong, now, but I think when something was a lot of fun to do in childhood, it's always nice to make the same things with art students.
The results of this workshop were very different and it's hard to point out one TV that I found better than the others. It was meant as a hands on technology workshop and what I liked were the very different technical approaches: While some students went deep into electronics for their first time, others built complex electro mechanic machines or crank operated devices that didn't need any electricity at all.

My Little Piece of Privacy is a curtain that moves along your studio window to protect you from the gaze of passersby and achieves precisely the opposite. I have the feeling that it is also the kind of idea that the 'creatives' in advertising and communication agencies would love to steal for their clients. Has anything like that ever happened to you? Have people from advertising ever approached you with a request to adapt one of your projects for their client? Is it something you'd be happy to do?

This installation is indeed an amazing attention-magnet. But the installation makes so much sense because it is just about a little hyperactive curtain. If the curtain would be replaced by a moving advertisement, it would be just poor. Maybe the 'creatives' which wanted to steal the idea also realized that. At least they didn't contact me and I haven't heard of any spin-offs, yet.

Niklas Roy, Pongmekanic, 2003-2004. Photo Andy Küchenmeister

I guess the previous question calls for the upcoming one: The first time i saw your work was at Transmediale where you were showing Pongmechanik. You were still a student at the udk in Berlin at the time. As far as i can see you're still a happy independent artist doing exactly what takes his fancy. How do you do that? Do you have any advice for talented media art students who would like to actually have a career as media artist and not as 'creative' doing websites for an 'interactive design' company?

I think I answered that already in two different ways: My personal trick is mainly to organize life in a way that I have a lot of time (and at least enough money) to work on things that I find interesting. Working in a company will not really help, as this takes too much time.
You can also try to follow those three golden rules that I mentioned before. Good luck!

How did you start being involved in media art? What attracted you in this field?

It was actually many years ago, when a friend took me for my first time to the Transmediale. I was working in the film business at that time, creating visual effects for feature films. This Transmediale visit caused two things: On the one hand, I've never seen so many interesting installations at one place before. I loved the way how technology was used in this very creative way. And on the other hand, I saw that there's plenty of space to make even more interesting things with technology. That's why I started to get involved in this field.

International Dance Party (The IDP in transport mode)

International Dance Party (Hypnotized by the music, the audience starts to dance. Energized by the dance actionthe IDF freaks out)

I saw the International Dance Party once in an exhibition in Amsterdam. i was alone in the room and could afford to throw away any kind of inhibition. But you must have witnessed the effect it has on a group of people. How do people react to it usually? Are they very self-conscious? Or rather extrovert?

Like the curtain, the IDP works amazingly well. But of course, there's a little bit of chain reaction involved. If one person starts to dance, it doesn't take long until the whole room takes off. The sad thing about this is, that I really like how the machine opens and closes and how it transforms its shape. People which are just dancing don't recognize that, as the installation always stays in full party mode. If that's the case, I sometimes try to convince the people to stop dancing. First they don't approve my suggestion, but if they do, they love the installation even more afterwards.

Has anyone ever bought the Beginner Set "Junior IDP"?

That's my main income!

Crazy Party Machine! - Amazing Technology!

Any upcoming project or exhibition that you'd like to share with us?

Yes, there's this exhibition in Barcelona's DHUB opening soon. The vernissage is on June 21st.

And then, there's another exhibition, called 'Paranoia' which is still going on in Lille's Gare St. Sauveur. Charles Carcopino curated this really great show. I can 100% recommend it and it's still running until 15th of August.

Gallerydrive / The Grand Illusion

Thanks Niklas!

Photography used on the homepage is by Martin W. Maier.

One thing that has puzzled me for years is the passion some people profess for the Louis Vuitton monogram. It's not that it's unsightly, it's just that the reason why some girls ruin themselves for the joy of sporting that insipid brown thing on their arm is beyond me. That prejudice against the brand has held me back from visiting the Espace culturel Louis Vuitton each time i was in Paris. I went a couple of times to the Fondation Cartier and to the Fondazione Prada in Milan but i couldn't get past the name of the Espace Culturel. Until last week when i decided that it was only fair to get rid of my narrow-mindedness.

Luc Mattenberger, Moon rise, 2009

It didn't start so well. I wasn't allowed to take any photo, not even of the artworks i had copiously photographed in other venues. When i asked why i wasn't allowed to take photos i was told "Because it's not allowed." The exhibition itself, however, made much more sense than the answer i had just received. The artworks selected makes you bounce from the poetical to the humorous to the downright dangerous. Plus, the LV cultural center team hands out hard cover catalogues of the show like other distribute b&w copies of press releases.

View of the exhibition space

"Somewhere Else" showcases the work of eighteen artists for whom expeditions are the starting point of artistic endeavours.

The exhibition opens with a work by Bas Jan Ader, a conceptual artist who disappeared at sea in 1975 while working on an art performance titled "In Search of the Miraculous".

Joanna Malinowska, In Search of the Miraculous, Continued.../part II of three, 2006

The title of the work that Joanna Malinowska presents in the gallery directly refers to Ader's last performance. In Search of the Miraculous, Continued.../part II is a continuous video shot of a solar-powered boombox playing Glen Gould's recording of Bach's 'Goldberg Variations'. The equipment was abandoned in the Canadian tundra, its sound fading in the wind. Notes of Bach and Gould might be forever audible if the installation survives storm, snow and winds. But this, of course, would be truly miraculous.

Fabrice Langlade, Un pont en porcelaine en Mongolie, 2010

Fabrice Langlade was showing the plans and model of a porcelain bridge he hopes to build one day on the steppe of Mongolia.

Fernando Prats, Acción Chaitén 17, Sismografía de Chile, 2009

Fernando Prats, Acción Chaitén 11, Sismografía de Chile, 2009

Fernando Prats, who will represent Chile at this year's Venice Art Biennial, celebrates the expressive work of the physical elements. Sometimes he's there to nudge and help natural elements. Other times, such as in Acción Chaitén, he merely records the result of nature's endeavors. Acción Chaitén documents the destruction wrought by the Chilean volcano which, when it erupted in 2008, covered an entire region in ash.

Marc Horowitz, National Dinner Tour, 2004-2005

Despite his wide notoriety, i confess that i had never heard of Marc Horowitz before. But did he make me laugh! In 2005, while working on a catalog shoot for Crate and Barrel, he managed to sneak in the words "dinner w/ marc 510-872-7326" on one of the pages of the catalog. The catalog was distributed, he lost his job but received more than 30,000 phone calls. He spent the following year driving across the country and having dinner with individuals he had never met. He documented "The National Dinner Tour" in charming pictures and blog posts.

The Marc Horowitz Signature Series is a set of 19 performances aimed at 'improving' the lives of the citizens he encountered. He planted an "Anonymous Semi-nudist Colony" in Nampa, Idaho, inviting passersby to shed some pieces of clothing and bounce around a park with him. In Craig, Colorado, he enticed people to bury their problems in a park plot. My favourite is the video he shot in Walsenburg, Colorado where he reenacted the techno viking dance session in a junkyard.

Laurent Tixador & Abraham Poincheval, Horizon moins 20, 2008

For Horizon moins 20, Laurent Tixador & Abraham Poincheval spent 20 days digging an underground tunnel in Murcia, Spain. They advanced one metre a day and sealed it up behind themselves as they went. Like moles.

Vue of Laurent Tixador & Abraham Poincheval's project in the exhibition space

Vue of Laurent Tixador & Abraham Poincheval's project in the exhibition space (detail)

Somewhere Else/Ailleurs was curated by Paul Ardenne and remains open at the Espace culturel Louis Vuitton until May 8, 2011.

Other artistic expeditions: Rentyhorn, making the legacy of colonialism visible, The Spice Trade Expedition - In pursuit of artificial flavoring, Biorama 2: the Moon Goose Experiment, Interview with Ulla Taipale from Capsula.

I had never heard of Laurent Montaron before last week. I was preparing a trip to Paris and going through the list of exhibitions open when i stumbled upon a small photo of a Catholic saint and, far more interestingly i should say, a press release that mentioned the artist's interest in the history of media from the appearance of mechanical modes of representation in the late 19th century up to today's different digital forms.

Off i was to see Montaron's solo show at the galerie schleicher+lange. The exhibition is small with only three pieces, each of them strong, perplexing and unlike anything i've seen anywhere else recently.

Laurent Montaron, PHOENIX, 2010, phonograph phénix, wood, waxcylinder with recording of a human voice speaking in tongues, installation view Kunsthaus Baselland

PHOENIX (detail), 2010

Phoenix awaits the visitor right as they step into the gallery. An antique Phénix, a wax-cylinder phonograph launched in 1902 by French mail-order company Maleville, is laying on a wooden stage. Someone has to come and activate the phonograph for you. During a few minutes, the time it takes for the needle to go from one end of the cylinder to the other, one can hear the voice of a person speaking in tongues. No sense can be made of what is said in the recording.

PHOENIX (detail), 2010

When he patented the phonograph in 1877, Thomas A. Edison -who ironically was suffering from increasing deafness- wasn't thinking about musical recordings. He saw the invention as an instrument that would provide a kind of immortality by preserving the human voice well after the person had died. It was a 'machine to record the last words of the dying'.

"My intention," the artist has said in an interview with curator Daniel Baumann, "was not only to transform these questions about the advent of the media into images -- although I do believe that to some extent the questions are being asked in the same way today as they were a hundred years ago -- but also to make the experience of death part of the work. As in a number of my other works, the physical medium is wearing out as we listen and we're witnessing the death of the sound. In a way the viewer remains the sole repository of the memory of the work."

Lent portrait de Sainte Bernadette, 2010

Lent portrait de Sainte Bernadette, 2010

The second work in the exhibition, Lent portrait de Sainte Bernadette ("Slow Portrait of St Bernadette", 2011), is a slow-motion 16 mm film loop with the camera moving across the face of the saint.

Bernadette Soubirous was a miller's daughter who made the fortune of a small market town in the SW of France. In 1858, she reported apparitions of "a small young lady" and required that a chapel was built at the site of her visions. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes is now a major place of Roman Catholic pilgrimage. It is said that after her death, Bernadette's body has shown no signs of decomposition.

Minolta Planetarium MS-15, 2011

The worked i found most amazing is Minolta Planetarium MS-15, a large-format photograph taken inside the planetarium in Memphis, in the United States. All one can see at first is a starry sky. After a while, the eye wanders and realizes that, in the foreground, there is the dark silhouette of the machine that projects the images of the stars inside the Planetarium.

These works subtly remind us that while technology has provided us with new means of perceiving and representing reality it has not necessarily brought us closer from 'the truth' for it has also given rise to new ways for questioning reality.

The exhibition closes tomorrow. Make haste and visit the galerie schleicher+lange if you're in Paris this weekend.

Yesterday i spent a few hours in Florence to see Emerging Talents at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS). The exhibition brings the spotlight on 16 artists nominated to the 2011 Emerging Talents award, created by CCCS to identify, promote and support young Italian art.

Alberto Tadiello, E13 000625, 2010. Exhibition view at Emerging Talents 2011,
Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Firenze. Photo: Martino Margheri

The selected artists, aged between 25 and 35 years, are talented Italians whose work has found its way into galleries but has not yet won broad public recognition. I can't applaud enough the initiative, there are plenty of young Italian contemporary artists and most of them don't get half of the support they deserve.

The works on show are radically different from each other and i've discovered a few artists whose career i'm going to follow with much attention from now on. More about them soon. Today, i'm going to introduce the show with an artist many of you probably know.

A few years ago, Alberto Tadiello's work started touring the blogs. The dysfunctional and elegant music boxes of his EPROM piece proved popular with both the media art and the contemporary art world. Quite an achievement in itself.

Alberto Tadiello, E13 000625, 2010 (detail)

The piece currently on view in Florence is directly inspired by early prototypes of sound weapons. As the artist explained to Italian mag arte e critica: I found a series of very suggestive images of some real "sound armies" set up by the Japanese army during the Second World War. They were like guns pointing to the sky, conceived for shooting down planes by using particular airwaves. Unlike current acoustic weapons, which are real weapons, those first prototypes have never been activated. Those images fascinated me a lot. This work probably still recalls these suggestions. It is a structure that juts out a lot from the wall, overhanging and conveying a sort of dangerousness. It produces a deep guttural sound and can be "exhibited" in every sense, both from a spatial and a sound viewpoint. It is fixed to and hanging on the wall and sound becomes a physical presence in movement able to sculpt the space.

Tadiello's version of the weapon looks down, it is dark, sleek, mysterious and looks like a commercial device (its name actually refers to an identification code for car horns.)

The "deep guttural sound is triggered by visitors as they draw near the sculpture. Just like the disconcerting noise of the Japanese weapons was engineered to unsettle the enemy, the sound of Tadiello's sculpture hits the visitor in the stomach, becoming a physical presence that shapes the space. Unfortunately or fortunately for me, the installation had been turned off yesterday afternoon which tells you how troubling the sound must have been for the employees who spend the whole day surveying the gallery.

Alberto Tadiello, E13 000625, 2010. Exhibition view at Emerging Talents 2011,
Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Firenze. Photo: Martino Margheri

Emerging Talents remains open until May 1, 2011 at Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS), Florence.

Credit image on the homepage: Alberto Tadiello, E13 000625, 2010. Electric horns, pipes, cables, transformers, metal brackets, steel tie-rods, 60 x 150 x 110 cm. Courtesy T293, Naples.