Expo Leeds
25-28.09.09
Friday
The first thing I visited on the Friday afternoon was the schools project led by Mira Calix at the Leeds City Museum, which consisted of upturned speaker cones being used to move piles of small objects, thereby demonstrating the physicality of sound. All very well in theory, but as soon as I turned one on, a gallery assistant rushed over and said it was far too loud and proceeded to turn it down so low that it no longer worked: the beads lay motionless on the surface of the politely-rumbling speaker. This is one of my regular concerns with the spaces sound artists are being asked to work in: staff are often either intolerant of ‘the noise’ or do not understand the material. For me, it’s the equivalent of hanging a painting in a darkened room because the colours are too gaudy.
My second major criticism of the weekend was pretty much the next thing I went to at the Leeds City Museum. There was a specially commissioned interactive piece ‘PEAL: A Virtual Campanile’, which was “a laser-triggered, computer controlled, light-sequenced emulation of a traditional church bell tower”. I mean, come on! Church bells? Really? Any other contemporary sound could easily be stretched across a midi scale and used in the same way, and would perhaps warrant a commission in a contemporary sonic arts festival. Using church bells immediately made me worry about the intention behind the piece. The combination of bland melodic sounds, and the ‘Guitar Hero’ style interaction came across as a piece devised by a composer and a community-arts leader rather than by a sound artist, and so I checked the programme notes, and that was exactly who devised it. The way it was installed also suggested this, with no consideration given to the overall effect: whilst the lighting and sculptural elements were indeed eye-catching, the whole effect was ruined by the composer sitting awkwardly in the centre with his laptop on a makeshift desk, and a long trail of leads snaking off to the wall. I expected a commissioned ‘audio-visual installation’ (which was what the brief had asked for) to be more visually considered. Why didn’t they just have a hand-bell orchestra sitting there under some disco lights for three days, and be done with it? Even the acoustics of the room seemed stacked against the piece, deadening the sounds: church bells should be at the very least resonant, and in a space like that they could have been physically overpowering.
Leaving the museum, I wandered into the Millennium Square with Tom Betts’ big screen interactive game. Nothing spectacularly innovative, but it was great seeing passers-by stopping and cartwheeling, or spiralling round on their bikes to generate patterns and sounds. It’s even better if you yourself can’t see the screen they’re basing their movements on.
