Thawing Colours
Thawing Colours, 2012, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
Interactive installation in collaboration with Dave Murray-Rust
Contact microphones, pebbles, ice, pigments, concatenative synthesis, paper, wool threads, speakers
Thawing Colours is an installation that was commissioned by the Talbot Rice Gallery and was created for the Unoccupied exhibition that took place in May 2012 in the Georgian Gallery of the Old College.
Thanks to Pat Fisher, Hazel Norcross and James Clegg from the Talbot Rice Gallery for their support, and special thanks to Tommy Stuart for encouragement, ideas and technical support. Finally, thanks to Elizabeth Ibbotson, Elizabeth Lyne, Alexis Smith and Joowon Park for curating the Unoccupied exhibition.
The piece involves the installation of a series of ice filled with pigments that release coloured fluids when they melt and of contact microphones attached to a wire structure and connected to Max/MSP patch that processes signals.
The ice balls hang from wool threads and wire hooks, and have locally-sourced pebbles inside them. The stone-base core and the wool help maintaining the ice temperature low. The wire hooks are suspended from a structure that hangs 4 meters above the floor onto which contact microphones are placed to sonically capture the movements of the wool-wire structure and of the ice, and the vibrations triggered by the direct interaction of participants and their presence in the space.
The contact microphones send data to the concatenative-synthesis system and the system reacts to the movements with a variation of metallic and ice shattering sounds. The ice, pebbles and wool invite the audience to interact through four tags that read ‘PULL me gently PLEASE’. The ice balls are hang daily and the colours of the ice vary so as to create a sort of micro geographical landscape on the paper which lays below.
In line with the theme of the exhibition, Thawing Colours addresses the idea of flow, change and temporality, the reinterpretation of space and materiality, and the interrelation between physical spaces and technologically mediated interaction experiences.
Rocio von Jungenfeld 