Thawing Colours
Thawing colours is a collaborative piece with [http://www.rociojungenfeld.eu Rocio Jungenfeld], involving ice, pigment, wool, contact microphones and concatenative synthesis.
A series of ice globes, containing pigment are suspended over a blank piece of paper. As the ice melts, pigment and colouring drips down, to form patterns, shapes and flows on the paper. When the ice melts, pebbles and wool are left suspended. Visitors are invited to gently disrupt the stationarity of the piece; as the ice and pebbles sway, movement is translated to the hooks and hangings, augmented with thin wires to create a maximum of interference. The inaudible vibrations in the metalwork at the top of the piece are captured by sensitive contact microphones, with microscopic movements producing huge metallic textures. As well as being played live, the sounds from the piece are used to trigger a concatenative synthesis system, which uses a corpus of noises collected from melting and shattering ice to re-synthesise the incoming sound.
Thanks to Diemo Schwarz for CataRT, Matt Venn for help prototyping the piezo amplifiers and Owen Green for Max/MSP help.
Thanks very much to Pat Fisher, Hazel Norcross and James Clegg from the Talbot Rice Gallery for being open to our ideas, and extra special thanks to Tommy Stuart for encouragement, ideas and help. Finally, thanks to Elizabeth Ibbotson, Elizabeth Lyne, Alexis Smith and Joowon Park for curating the Unoccupied exhibition.