Year : 2003
Exhibited.
Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney 2003.
Materials.
Stainless steel, Aluminium, Audio and Solar electronics.
Dimensions.
Footprint variable, each unit 300m dia. x 3.5m.
Notes.
Haiku is a multi-part solar-powered environmental sound sculpture that distributes a series of traditional Japanese poems via miniature digital audio storage units operated by solar timers. Haiku is illustrated whilst installed at Boutwell-Draper Galley, Sydney as part of the ‘Gone to Earth’ solo exhibition 2003. A new solar accumulator/timer circuit was developed to permit this project to operate indoors.
Slight variations in power availability cause variations in audio chip activation with the consequence that the ‘ensemble’ produces an ‘infinite-mix’ of thirty voice phrases, never repeating exact patterns.
Haiku is a development of Meta-Diva and Dual Nature and is a part of the I.D.E.A.S. research project (Interactive Digital Environmental Audio Systems).
IDEAS.
The principal aim is to create a series of modular, multi-unit, environmental sound sculptures, which exhibit increasing complexity and sophistication. The electronic systems within these sculptures will be robust enough for permanently installation in outdoor environments, will be self-powered (solar) and have the capacity to store, mix and replay good quality audio. In addition, the units forming the environmental sound-sculpture (an ‘ensemble’) will display some forms of A.I. (say interactions with environmental conditions, fauna or human presence or the sound activities of proximate units).
IDEAS will be developed as part of the Swiss “Artists in Labs” Art + Science collaborations during 2004; see “Theorem”.
© Dr Nigel Helyer 2003.
THE ARTIST
THE SOUND IN THIS SITE
It is ironic that the website of a Sound Artist contains very little audio material. This is, of course, intentional, the principal reasons being that I place a strong emphasis on the experience of a work in-situ, mediated as it is by the environmental context and the listening trajectory of the viewer/auditor. Secondly, the majority of these projects are multi-source environments, often operating with interactive or dynamic elements that are virtually impossible to represent as a linear stereo field.
A method I have adopted, that in some part overcomes such problems of Audio representation of complex sound installations, is to develop parallel Radiophonic projects. These Radio works are designed to give a general impression of the content and intention of the Installations whilst recognising the linear and more narrative form of stereo broadcast.
A range of ‘Sonic Archives’ may be ordered directly via this site for research and/or educational purposes.
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RANDOM QUOTES
A phenomenon by definition is inextricably linked to the possession of a sensory body. Naturally it is our habitual (and inevitable) use of the body’s perceptual horizons as indexical mechanisms which have created topologies of embodied and disembodied events or thresholds of the tangible and the intangible. As any foray, beyond a world bounded by Newtonian physics will demonstrate, our perceptually framed understanding of spatial and temporal reality fails to recognise objects and events which refuse to conform to the scale and velocity of the Procrastes bed which the frame of our body has become.......
Nigel Helyer 1992, An Unrequited Space, in Working in Public.