Fortune Tellers

Wednesday 6th of July 2016

The artwork will come to life through the voices of a choir of Chinese classical singers. It is probably the most important component of the piece.

From a conceptual point of view, the vices of the opera singers will bring an epic layer of ‘high-brow seriousness’ to the piece; something which I hope will also contribute to creating a subtle humor and irony with regards to the way the Financial Market is often perceived by those who… don’t work in finance.

So far I have put several ads around the internet and offline, in the tangible world.

The fact that I am looking for opera singers, capable of singing in Chinese Mandarin is making my search rather difficult.
On the other hand, after contacting the many music schools in London, I have soon realised that summer is also a synonym of holidays and despite the helpful departments of some of the institutions I contacted, I haven’t made any contact with potential singers and noprogress with recording the sound component of the piece.

On a different note, there are some good news with regards to a funding application I made a little while ago. The British Council has decided to support the project and the Connections Through Culture bursary will join the Travel Bursary from A-N and contribute to support the solo show at the MoCA. Amazing!

This also means I will be able to pay the singer a bit more than I had anticipated. Provided I can find some :)

Friday 1st of July 2016

The piece I will be presenting at MoCA will be a sculptural interactive installation, which will react to the presence of the audience in the Pavilion and, when touched by people, it will conduct a choir of three Chinese opera singers. The choir will sing numbers, which will be extracted in real time from a database containing the forecast of the Shanghai Stock Exchange (Index).

Shanghai hosts one of the largest Stock Exchanges of China, together with Shenzen and Hong Kong. The artwork will be a site specific installation: it will be comprised of a structure built in extruded aluminium and panels or flags, made out of neoprene coupled with jersey.

The panels will be screenprinted with Bare Electric Paint; a conductive paint that allows to transform non conductive surfaces, into sensing components.

So far I have used the paint and a good selection of conductive materials, ranging from copper, to steel and aluminium on a range of supports; and as my background is in printmaking, I have been working mainly with screenprinting such paint on paper.

This time, also thanks to the skills of the great talented printer Faye McNulty, I will try to achieve similar if not better results on the neoprene, quite an unusual surface to work with.