It’s a great privilege to be involved with participatory youth program called QUADwrangle over the next two weeks. I’m working with a bunch of young sound artists from the College of the Arts (VCA), to create an interactive sound sculpture that will reside at Arts Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax theatre August 13-16.
The intention is to create an immersive and fun piece with this awesome crew of artists and musicians. We’re going to explore new processes together, and develop a work that will invite and engage the audience to get involved an collaborate with one another to make music.
All too often these sort of interactive works run the risk of having too much happening when lots of people are interacting with it. The challenge for us is going to be to get this sculpture to become more musical, more harmonious and more inviting the more people who are playing with it.
These themes are intended to mirror Shaun Parker’s The Yard, a contemporary dance piece that is running concurrently at the Fairfax theatre, which tackles the cultural divide within the school yard.
Today we spent the day creating original sounds, that evoke a school yard of nostalgia of sampling old primary school xylophones into my Teenage Engineering OP-1, creating Drum Racks of clunking rulers, tearing paper and textas, as well as manipulating field recordings into soundscapes within Ableton live.
Matt Ridgway 