A Third Week

A Third Week
(some sketchy thoughts on the Studio Tonne installation)

Studio Tonne’s sound toys are possible equivalents to intertextual poetics and theory. When using the toys the viewer becomes creator or collaborator, and not just a consumer, as they “play.” Studio Tonne has given up part of their control as designers over user experience to the user, just as the reader, with their personal and cultural associations and memories, “writes” their own experience of a text. One visitor to the show has likened the aesthetics and experience of the applications to video games. The sound toys remain distinct from the Internet’s web of links, pages and content, or the sampling embedded in video games. Although the Internet is a hypertext “system of interconnected writings,” ST’s toys alter the conventional relationships between images and sound on the web or video game; the manipulation of graphic language produces unique soundscapes. The “links” of hypertextual systems are rich layers of audio-visual composition. Indeed, video games are systems that, as “cybertexts”, contain a rigid structure within which the user creates their own narrative.

As examples of hypermedia, the sound toys are representative of our post-industrial society; we are used to being in control, of customising our experiences of text, images and film when using the internet. As a visitor on Sunday remarked, “it looks like an iphone app I’ve got.” In this respect, the work is a reversal of Robin’s photographic projection in which the viewer was unable to control the fade of one image and the exposure of the next, the next image they see or for how long they will see it. Robin's piece was an antidote to the hypertextual internet-enabled environment; photographs of a hospital's hidden spaces and graphic content are both forced upon the viewer and withdrawn without consideration of their desires. The visitor to Fusebox in its third week rather than its first is able to speed up the tempo of their composition, reset, exit and switch application at any time as well as producing relatively unique compositions of sound and graphic image; the visitors’ temporal, audio and visual experiences are to a large extent, decided by them.


Quote of the day (Sunday 24th May): “it’s not exactly an open house is it?”

Also: “so are they selling it, or is this just an exhibition?”
[his reminded me of a comment that Auger_Loizeau’s Afterlife installation came across as promotional, transforming the space into a show room, all bit it as one in which the glossy product is barely lit by the projected image of its accompanying film and not a[ppropriately on display. Not only is this relationship indicative of their mutual product-based practice, but also of their shared ability to manufacture conceptual devices that blur the boundaries of fine art and design. If installation-based art is defined by its disorientating effect on the viewer, inserting these “products” into an unlit space with an unconventional art gallery or design show room aesthetic serves to blur this distinction further.]

And lastly: “which one will make the most noise?”