WEEK 5

Today, I decided to go to Kinetica. It was the only weekend I had off. There were two exhibitions. Downstairs were works by Jim Bond and upstairs were works by Ray Lee and would you believe it, they were art/technology that incorporated sound. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. Sound art was what I was looking for.

These pictures were taken downstairs. Instillation and Sculptures by Jim Burns.

This is the Pin Drop machine

The magnet switches on and picks up a small pin. When switched off the pin drops and the sound wave travels down a sensor which magnifies the sound into the little speaker.

Steel Head. This head scared the hell out of me. It was resting (as the image shows above), I was staring at it and it moved, lifted in a creepy way, it paused every millisecond and lifted it’s head to look at me. Sooo cool.

The problem with the works being displayed was the lack of information given by the gallery and the artist. Very few of them had names displayed and the ones that did also had materials and measurements listed. I asked an employee why there were no information displayed and she said “The artists don’t like describing their work. They want the viewers to look at them and explore what they are looking at.”

I took a picture of this newspaper article on my way out (it was displayed at the entrance). The pixels were messed up so I found the article on the web.

Into the labyrinth of sounds in motion

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Into the labyrinth of sounds in motion

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 04/01/2007

Ray Lee explains the invisible forces behind his bewitching kinetic sound sculptures to Ivan Hewett

“A maker of kinetic sound sculptures” is how Ray Lee prosaically describes himself. But there’s nothing prosaic about his most recent opus, which is about to receive its London première.


	Captivating: Lee’s installation sounds like a vast choir of invisible voices

Part installation, part performance piece, Siren is full of bewitchingly strange sights and sounds. “I’m interested in invisible forces,” says Lee, “especially when it’s to do with action at a distance – things such as magnets and electromagnetic waves.”

It’s a pleasingly quaint idea in an age when “action at a distance” has become the norm. Every time we flick a switch or make a mobile call, we make things happen far away. But, like many people who work in the area of kinetic art, Ray Lee has a yearning for the days when these things inspired wonder and sent a shiver down the spine. I’m feeling it myself as we stand in the near-darkness of the venue for Siren.

This is a labyrinth of interconnected arched brick-lined spaces underneath London Bridge station, known as the Shunt vaults. Corridors flanked by more vaults lead away in all directions into the inky blackness. These vaults now house a bar and theatre collective called The Shunt Lounge, which has commissioned Lee to re-assemble Siren following its first outing in an aircraft hanger in Oxfordshire.

Why Siren? Because when it’s set in motion, Lee’s installation sounds like a vast choir of invisible voices. These “voices” are, in fact, electronic tone generators, mounted at each end of long metal bars, which rotate horizontally around their mid-points like up-ended ceiling fans. There are 30 such rotating arms, each sitting on a tripod. Some of these are at chest height, others tower three feet over the audience’s heads.

“I got the idea when working on a visual installation at a disused mill in Derbyshire,” says Lee. “I made machines that embodied the idea of spinning, and then afterwards I thought, ‘What would happen if I added an aural element?’ I discovered that, when you put sound in motion, fascinating things happen. It changes the way you perceive space.” Imagine a forest of horizontal propellers, all spinning independently, together emitting a mysterious and euphonious chord, and you’ll have some idea of Siren.

But the set-up is only the raw material for what Lee insists is more than an installation. “It’s a set of sculptures, which I hope are interesting to look at. But it’s also a proper performance piece, which lasts about 40 minutes, and is carefully choreographed. I perform it with Harry Dawes: we worked together a lot in the ’90s as a performance art company called Lee & Dawes.

“The two performers enter each in their identical felt suits, switch on the oscillators, tuning each one carefully. Then the arms are set in motion. Gradually we increase the speed to a maximum of 75 revolutions per minute, the lights are turned off, and all you can see are the little red lights at the end of each arm whirling at different speeds. Then the motors are turned off, the arms slow down, and there’s this extraordinary moment when finally they all come to rest. It’s as if the air has suddenly frozen.”

So in Siren there’s drama of a sort, there’s an amazing spectacle, and there are fascinating sounds. Is there music as well? “It’s very important to me that this piece has musical value,” says Lee. “We tune the oscillators to a definite mode, and, as we tune the bass ones first, it means the piece takes on a discernible shape, a kind of long upward glissando. Also, as the sounds whirl, you get these interesting sonic effects.”

Are these anything like the “virtual melodies” that arise in certain kinds of contemporary music? “Exactly. There are things that emerge from the whirling sounds that may really be there, or they may be aural illusions.”

But surely these sounds could be created with much less fuss by digital synthesis. “I very much doubt whether anything so rich could be created using digital means. But that’s not the point. These machines are a kind of anti-digital statement, they’re about as purely analogue as you can get. They exist to do one thing only, which is make this sound. And it’s important that the sound arises as the result of operating the machines in a very precise way. That’s why this is intrinsically a performance piece, which I want to be intensely live. It’s part of my personal crusade to make music a more visually entrancing experience.”

‘Siren’ is at The Shunt Lounge, Joiner Street, London SE1 (www.shunt.co.uk), Jan 17-19, and as an installation only at Kinetica Museum, Old Spitalfields Market, London E1 (www.kinetica-museum.org), March 15-29