Unprepared Piano

Thomson & Craighead have been working together since 1993, using sound, video, and the internet in their works to explore how technology changes the world around us. They are based in London. Currently, Thomson lectures at the Slade School of Fine Arts and Craighead is a senior researcher at the University of Westminster and lectures at the University of London.

Unprepared Piano is a grand piano connected to a database of MIDI files appropriated from the internet. The piano then performs each piece by randomly selecting different parts, so it might play drum parts along with strings, brass and woodwind parts. Each time the piano replays a piece, it randomly reselects the parts it plays. No performance is ever the same, although traces of the original score can be heard in the performance. This results in the performance sounding like a little kid is playing around on the piano.

The artists didn't specify what their goal was in this piece, perhaps to force people to reexamine their views on music. If that is the case, they definitely accomplished their goals. The grand piano is traditionally revered as a strong and authoritative instrument, and because in this piece no one is playing the piano, the piano becomes even more powerful to the viewer. However, because the music is just so random sounding, it doesn't really sound like anything other than a cat walking across it. This urges the viewer to reexamine their views on music, that perhaps there is a certain formula to composing, and not just throwing random notes together. It is also possible that it is urging the viewer to look at the parts of a musical whole, and notice that each individual part is important to the whole, not matter how random it sounds.

Via Eyebeam.

Revisions for Project 1

The edited version.

David Jimison and JooYoun Paek - Too Smart City

The concept:

The final product:

David Jimison's work focuses on the interactions between technology and culture and says that Too Smart City is direct result of everything he's been studying as a Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech. JooYoun Paek's work focuses on human behavior and technology. Both artists create work that respond to urban life, such as Paek's Polite Umbrella or Jimison's Storyscape.

Too Smart City is intended to be an interactive public installation, exaggerating the original purpose of ordinary park furniture. Benches, trashcans, and signs are fitted with so much computer intelligence that they become almost useless: the viewer is only allowed a certain amount of time to rest on a bench, can only place a certain type of trash in a trash can, or may become confused by the excessive amount of directions given by a sign. The artists describe Too Smart City as a way to

"involve people in a playful examination of the effects that these everyday objects hold upon our lives. Through comedic exaggeration, we hope to invoke the guests' imagination of both positive and negative futures."

But overall, Too Smart City is the examination of "too much of a a good thing." I feel that Jimison and Paek have definitely accomplished their goals with this piece; they were trying to make the pieces inconspicuous until someone tried to use them, in which case they became activated and eventually became more annoying than good.

Via Eyebeam.

scans

photos

Meet Bruno, official mascot of Buzzy's Country Store on Rt 5.