"Sound is "an agent of destabilisation which challenges an understanding

of the real based on the physical, visible and enduring object."

Fran Dyson

e Q is a sound installation that surveys what happens when the machines of the past collide with the machines of the future. It examines how sound has been mutated and transfigured by the manifold uses of soft / hardwares.

Sound has been one of the fundamental areas of invention and experimentation within art and technology culture, with practitioners quickly embracing new forms of production and exhibition. Technology now enables new forms of spatial, rhythmic and tonal juxtaposition within sound environments, with advances in algorithmic and chaos driven approaches to sound composition, prompting a paradigm shift within the field of experimental sound art.

e Q takes a critical approach to the uses of technology within sound art, investigating supposedly outmoded technological tools, in a rich complex of remembrances, placing antiquated instruments alongside current implements, provoking timely speculation about the consequences of aligning componentry systems strategically, as opposed to technologically.

As technology evolves as a single contained and exclusive system, with each technological transformation, new system protocols are formed and hardware system specifications created. Optimistic propaganda suggests that these developments are allowing for a future of seamless interaction between both people and machine, and between machine and machines. However it is becoming increasingly clear that the rapid development of new technological apparatus is forcing a huge amount of obsolescence. In many cases, software and hardware that was state-of-the-art in the very recent past, is no longer compatible with technology of the present.

Participation in the pursuit of technological confluence in creating an exclusive system of "now" technology. However "now" technology is expensive, and the financial threshold for participation in a socity reliant on these exclusive systems is creating uneasy social tensions, and a technologically disenfranchised underclass.

e Q endeavours to transcend the technological and historical tic of our own era, and open up the space for exploration of the "unresolved issues of accelerating decrepitude, inbuilt redundancy and techno-waste" through the medium of sound.

The project comprises four distinct installations, which also form components of a larger system. To demonstrate the viability of integrated technological systems, the output of each installation supplies sound to each of the other works. Old and new technologies form modules of a larger organism, recycling the sound, turning in upon itself, and creating an engine of perpetual renewal.

 

" .... we are in a constant sideways-moving squeeze-out dance, as low-end

becomes expensive designer retro, and the creators move on to make new cultural hooks with cheap tools."

Mitchell Whitelaw

 

in FO

 

r a d i o q u a l i a 15 Kenton St, Adelaide, SA 5000 ph + 61 8 8272 2682 radioqualia@va.com.au

Contemporary Arts Centre of South Australia 14 Porter St Parkside SA 5063 ph + 618 8272 2682, fax + 61 8 8373 4286 cacsa@camtech.net.au