Uploaded June 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Weston Olencki performs his work 'chime array' with Brice Catherin, Maria Sappho, and Colin Frank at Electric Spring 2020.
westonolencki.com
electricspring.co.uk
cerenem.org
Brice Catherin: bricecatherin.org
Maria Sappho: mariasappho.com
Colin Frank: colinfranksounding.com
chime array reaches out in two directions from a common suburban object.
Commercial wind chimes are repurposed into electrical nodal sensors, in which humans’ electrical capacitance directly excite a non-linear feedback network, similar reaching one’s hands into the circuits of a no-input mixer. Audio outputs (derived from concatenations of Rob Hordijk’s rungling Benjolins...) are analytically broken down into their musical components and their data fed back into this synthetic web, creating feedback loops not only internally but also between the machine’s analysis and re-synthesis faculties. These wind chimes are merely tapped for their material properties, metallic rods hung from strings, just as our electrical potential, movement, and presence are only needed to activate them.
Opposite this I present wind chimes as ‘natural metonyms’, objects which both symbolize, and also register the presence of wind, rurality, and natural environments. They make their own vibration via sensing vibration. Gradually video material shot from urban green spaces is chroma-keyed or ‘green-screened’ according to its own green content (further replaced or represented by the external lights) while these metaphorical objects are led out of the performance space; the signifier is taken to meet the signified. Various displaced fragments (local field recordings, pitch-mapping sine waves, Markov-driven scrubbings of the work’s materials, a washed-out rendition of Beethoven’s Pastoral...) are swirled together in this cloud of metonymic associations, leaving one to find their own path through the tangle of sonic representations of nature, place, and location.
Audio recorded by Alex Harker
Video recorded, edited and mixed by Sam Gillies
Weston Olencki performs his work 'chime array' with Brice Catherin, Maria Sappho, and Colin Frank at Electric Spring 2020.
westonolencki.com
electricspring.co.uk
cerenem.org
Brice Catherin: bricecatherin.org
Maria Sappho: mariasappho.com
Colin Frank: colinfranksounding.com
chime array reaches out in two directions from a common suburban object.
Commercial wind chimes are repurposed into electrical nodal sensors, in which humans’ electrical capacitance directly excite a non-linear feedback network, similar reaching one’s hands into the circuits of a no-input mixer. Audio outputs (derived from concatenations of Rob Hordijk’s rungling Benjolins...) are analytically broken down into their musical components and their data fed back into this synthetic web, creating feedback loops not only internally but also between the machine’s analysis and re-synthesis faculties. These wind chimes are merely tapped for their material properties, metallic rods hung from strings, just as our electrical potential, movement, and presence are only needed to activate them.
Opposite this I present wind chimes as ‘natural metonyms’, objects which both symbolize, and also register the presence of wind, rurality, and natural environments. They make their own vibration via sensing vibration. Gradually video material shot from urban green spaces is chroma-keyed or ‘green-screened’ according to its own green content (further replaced or represented by the external lights) while these metaphorical objects are led out of the performance space; the signifier is taken to meet the signified. Various displaced fragments (local field recordings, pitch-mapping sine waves, Markov-driven scrubbings of the work’s materials, a washed-out rendition of Beethoven’s Pastoral...) are swirled together in this cloud of metonymic associations, leaving one to find their own path through the tangle of sonic representations of nature, place, and location.
Audio recorded by Alex Harker
Video recorded, edited and mixed by Sam Gillies
