A THREE MONTH WARM UP
2 channel outdoor audio installation, 2009

“...deeply, beautifully unsettling, a perpetual approach with no end in sight, like Edvard Munch’s infinite scream; the chaos of modern urban life packed into a public square and let loose.”
Cyclic Defrost | Australia

“...the type of listening experience that words and samples simply can’t do any justice to...immediately grabbed me and never let go.”
Smallfish | UK

A Three Month Warm Up was created for the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria's Assume Nothing exhibition. The multi-venue event appropriated several locations across the city, and I was invited to develop an outdoor sound installation for Market Square, a landmark public space in Victoria, BC, Canada.

My installation used 124 individual field recordings made in the semi-covered market over a three month period. I decided that instead of using specialized microphones or recorders, I would record using a more homogenizing device: the iPhone. The built-in iPhone microphone blurred specific details and directional information to create narrow band interpretations of the evolving subject matter, which ranged from brass bands, to children playing, to the emptying of garbage cans.

Inspired by the cacophony of notes played by a symphony during warm up, where a single unified tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices, I wanted to create a work that spoke of the public space as a reservoir of sonic activity, as if a residual echo of everything that occurred during those three months had been trapped within the structure.

The recordings were filtered to remove recognizable micro-events, time stretched so they were all exactly the same length, and then layered, allowing the composition to develop dynamically through the random interaction of the 124 elements.

The resulting 80 minute work was played back as a loop in the market from January to May 2009, appropriating the existing speaker system normally used for canned music. The works continuous presence, and low playback volume, created a transparent overlay onto the square which spoke of both time, latent memory, and the particular sonic fingerprint of the space.