Nicolas Collins | essay |
Daguerreotypes 2006 Exhibition
Ehemalige Polnische Botschaft Unter den Linden
Installation. For reanimated LCD displays.
Installation. For reanimated LCD displays.
Conducting workshops in hardware hacking with poor art students is like visiting
a tribe that ekes out a hardscrabble existence in a none-too-fertile land
-- just as hoofs are boiled down to make Jello, and testicles are served up
for breakfast, no part of an eviscerated toy goes to waste: sound-producing
circuitry is bent and amplified, motors that spun wheels now twitch feathers
in homage to Tinguely, and colorful plastic cases are adapted to hold yesterday’s
or tomorrow’s circuit. But what to do with those tiny LCD screens, across
which hockey-players once skated or blobs shot hoops? Removed from the corpse
and reanimated with a few simple oscillators, these sporting scenes are transformed
into animated digital daguerreotypes. Add a light source and a lens, and the
fractured pixels jitter across walls, floor or ceiling. A quiet celebration
of the ephemeral, peripheral and discarded elements in our lives.
Nicolas Collins,
born 1954 in New York, lives in Chicago. He studied composition with Alvin
Lucier at Wesleyan University, worked for many years with David Tudor, and
has collaborated with numerous soloist and ensembles around the world. He
lived most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Visiting Artistic Director
of Stichting STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin.
Since 1997 he has been editor-in-chief of the Leonardo Music Journal. He
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught since 1999. Recent recordings
are available on PlateLunch, Periplum and Apestaartje. His book Handmade
Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking was published by Routledge
in 2006. www.NicolasCollins.com