organ grinder
Installation / Performance with Easy Credit Theater
International Sculpture Conference 2000: Houston, TX 2000
organ grinder was the largest and most engaging of the pupa-chrysalis series of works that explored emerging interactive forms caught between the organic and technological. The installation took its namesake from the fifteenth century automatic instruments and composition machines that explored mechanically driven interactions with sound and space. The assemblage additionally investigated its relationship to the atrium void of the Phillip Johnson-designed building - a hollow shell that desired activation by the insertion of “organs.”
Suspended between thirty and fifty feet in the air, the "organs" hung from thin metal “ribs” that arced into the central void of the atrium from their moorings on the surrounding columns, which previously were mere decorative. Biologically determined, the “organs” were in suspended states of (in)animation. They responded to movement through and around the atrium by motion sensors hidden within, as a nervous system. The resulting movement, sound, and light explored respiratory, circulatory and reproductive natures.
The total effect presented an exaggerated vision of skeletal structure, circulatory and neural networks and responsive organs working out their identity in a growingly prosthetic world. The organs, pieces appropriated from past installations, were adapted or integrated wholesale into new configurations gleaned from previous incarnations and caught up in their own evolutionary web.
A visceral nature was inherent in organ grinder's materials as well as reactions. The rough translucent fibreglass stretched over frames of screen, bamboo, and steel gave the impression of skin. When the sensors triggered interior lighting, a soft amber and green glow seeped out across the undulating surfaces increasing its fleshy appearance while cannibalized motors clankingly pushed and pulled rocker arms to life and audibly animated the surrounding body.
Performance became an integral aspect in the presentation of the work. The genealogical origin of organ grinder is a semi-automatic sound machine used to entertain street crowds insisted on the temporary inhabitation of a public space as a theatrical event. organ grinder reached its culmination for the closing reception for the International Sculpture Conference 2000 in May-June 2000. Light, sound, sculpture, and performance combined to create a total spatial transformation of the empty atrium volume into a charged theatrical space, if not carnivalistic and liminal. The accompanying performance by Richie Hubscher’s Easy Credit Theater tranformed organ grinder and the space of the building into a "surrealist dream of associations and emotions, with dancers climbing up, down, and through the moving, suspended objects.” *
It is this symbiotic relationship that +parasite investigates and draws out in its practice of interfacing the physical human biological and the increasingly technological and ephemeral aspects of space.
*Armstrong, Cameron. “Site/Work/S: A Public Forum.” Sculpture Magazine July/August 2001, p. 46.
