- Venue
- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
- Location
- North East England
John Cage’s Variations VII, first performed in New York in 1966, relocated to Gateshead’s BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art as a centrepiece to the region-wide AV Festival. The festival itself promises a wide variety of ambitious events and interventions under the umbrella theme of “Broadcast” – seeking to establish a tenuous link with the national move to digital TV which took its first steps last year. The performers were Atau Tanaka, Matt Wand, and the Newcastle-based experimental musicans Zoviet France.
Arriving at a satisfactory description of Variations VII is inherently problematic; sound was picked up from the surroundings – TV and radio broadcasts, telephone conversations, household appliances – and manipulated by the performers to produce an auditory collage from these basic elements. As Cage put it, the experience of the audience depends entirely on what is “in the air at the moment of performance”. “It could sound awful. It could sound amazing” was the neat summary of festival director Honour Harger.
A large room filled with wires, speakers, extension cables, feeding into the centre of the room. Four tables covered in a variety of objects. A table fan, scanner, sewing machine, oscilloscope, hoover, televisions, radios, laptops. A vast array of obscure and everyday objects, new and obsolete technologies. Heart monitors worn by the performers provided a disconcerting bass track. Mobile phones fed back ambient sounds from around the city. The volume gradually rose, each new layer of input building on and distorting the sounds of the last. The various performers struggled to control the discordance and at times the sheer pressure of sound began to consume itself, a white noise of static. A burst of cheering and applause from a game of cricket on Indian TV. Metronomic ticking from kitchen appliances, a fragment of garbled speech from the radios, the steady hum of background noise amplified ten-fold.
The event space became a reverberating chamber, a temporary heart of global and local communication, feeding off the auditory detritus that bombards us ceaselessly. As promised (or forewarned), there was no progression, no narrative bar that imposed upon it by the audience. This intense and challenging experience provided a new interpretation of the cacophony we have learnt to live with, or tune out.
