Son-O-House
public artwork for Industrieschap Ekkersrijt,
in collaboration with composer Edwin van der Heide
Son en Breugel, The Netherlands, 20002004
intro
The Son-O-House is one of our typical art projects which
allow us to proceed more carefully and slowly (over a period of three to four
years) while generating a lot of knowledge that we apply to larger and speedier
projects. Son-O-House is what we call Œa house where sounds live¹, not being a
Œreal¹ house, but a structure that refers to living and the bodily movements
that accompany habit and habitation. In the Son-O-House a sound work is
continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up
actual movements of visitors.
description
Along the highway between Son en Breugel and Eindhoven
situates a large industrial park with a special quarter reserved for companies
from the IT and new-media industry. The artwork¹s role is for strengthening the
identity of the area, not only as a technological statement but also as a
social space where people can organize informal meetings, relax during lunch
hours or just enjoy its beauty. The structure is both an architectural and a
sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical
structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound. It is an
instrument, score and studio at the same time.
The
structure is derived from typical action-landscapes that develop in a house: a
fabric of larger scale bodily movements in a corridor or room, together with
smaller scale movements around a sink or a drawer. This carefully choreographed
set of movements of bodies, limbs and hands are inscribed on paper bands as
cuts (an uncut area corresponds with the bodily movement, a first cut through
the middle corresponds with limbs, and finer cuts correspond with movements of
the hands and feet). We staple the pre-informed paper bands together at the
point where they have the most connective potential and as a result curvature
emerges. The outcome is an arabesque of complex intertwining lines (white paper
model) that is both a reading of movements on various bodily scales and a
material structure since the paper curves stand upright in cooperation with
each other. We only have to sweep these lines sideways to marry the open
structure of lines with the closed surface of the ground. This results again in
a three-dimensional porous structure (purple paper model) which is very similar
to the structure that is obtained by the combing, curling and parting of hair.
We digitize this paper analog-computing model and remodel it into the final
structure of interlacing vaults which sometimes lean on each other or sometimes
cut into each other.
In the house-that-is-not-a-house we position 23 sensors at strategic spots to indirectly influence the music. This system of sounds, composed and programmed by sound artist Edwin van der Heide, is based on moiré effects of interference of closely related frequencies. As a visitor one does not influence the sound directly, which is so often the case with interactive art. One influences the real-time composition itself that generates the sounds. The score is an evolutionary memoryscape that develops with the traced behavior of the actual bodies in the space.