This post is about the Sound Collage Book Box (in)curiosity in my recent Absurd Museum: Dr Kali Gehry’s Cabinet of (in)Curiosities and Ecstatic Nonsense.
Sound Collage Book Box started as a collage of a thrift store acquired loose bound book of 1950s photographs of unknown people. I ripped, glued, scratched and combined this book over a period of months, eventually causing the spine of this book to give way. Intending to replace the spine, and having just started to play with an Arduino-like audio card, I decided to make a metal spine, and bolt the book inside a cigar box while wiring page turning handles on the backs of the pages so that as the pages are turned, a new sound is triggered to accompany the viewed page. The sounds themselves intersect/collide with the imagery of their corresponding page, at times jarring, at times complimentary: bubbling water, road traffic, CB noise, sonar. When the project’s the cigar box is opened and closed, a creaking heavy steal door plays.
Video to come.