Owl Project [Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall and Steve Symons] work with craft and electronics to create a fusion of sculpture and sound art, creating sonic machines, interfaces and objects. Drawing on influences such as 70’s synthesiser culture, woodwork, stone age and current digital technologies. The resulting artwork is a quirky and intriguing critique of the allure and production of technology. The result is a distinctive range of musical and sculptural instruments that critique human interaction with computer interfaces and our increasing appetite for new and often disposable technologies.
Simon Blackmore
Antony Hall
Twitter: @owlproject
Web: www.owlproject.com
The combination of caffeine and the ambience of arcades…
The combination of caffeine and the ambience of arcades has always inspired us to dream up new ideas for projects. For Sonic Pixels @ Barton Arcade we decided that we wanted to simply respond to sound of a coffee shop conversation, the emergent rhythms and melodies of two people speaking together. We began by recording a conversation about what we might do with the Sonic Pixel system, how we could use synthesised sounds to simulate speech and conversation. We then converted the our words into synthesised musical instruments.
Listening back to the soundtrack without the speech revealed some musical sounding loops and phrases. When we mixed the speech back in and were left with a collection of abstract fragments of conversation matched with musical loops. Often the loops fitted with full words and segments of conversation, forming interesting rhythms from the most mundane elements of our conversation.