From this month’s theme, “Media Rebirth”, here are 3 glimmers of experimental work that we encourage you to experience…
Billboards — Milan Schell
BILLBOARDS utilizes a customized pickup system to capture the LED screens and incidental radio signals of two digital billboards on NYC’s Canal Street. Public advertising technology is treated as a musical instrument, keeping the source material recognizable both as part of the urban environment and as a sonic microcosm in itself.
Schell treats a visual facet of the world around him to produce a sound piece with a hyper-zoomed visual. The original thing, in its entirety, is unrecognizable, but it is rematerialized to offer a new work with a new sensory function.
Tapescape — Levi Lu
Tapescape is an interactive sound installation that reimagines magnetic tape as a spatial surface for composition. Rather than treating tape as a linear medium for fixed playback, Lu records and arranges sound on tapes across flat acrylic panels, allowing composition to exist as a field of directions, densities, and gestures distributed in space.
The work creates a tactical opportunity for an element son tape recording that is not usually tactile.
Sampling in Music (Hung Up — Madonna)
Sampling is one of the most prominent forms of media repurposing in mainstream music. While the original work isn’t transitioning out of its audio format, it takes on an entirely new sonic shape.
Take Madonna’s “Hung Up,” for example. The song samples ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight),” a group famously selective about granting permission to use their music. The success of “Hung Up” is a testament to how effectively an existing piece of music can be reworked into something new.
The art of sampling was brought into the mainstream through its widespread use in hip-hop production, where you might find a snippet of a Baroque concerto transformed into the central melodic hook of a beat. Some of the most celebrated masters of the practice include artists like J Dilla and Daft Punk.