Live Art is a generic term that describes acts of individual or collaborative, innovative and explorative, performance practice. It can be undertaken in relation to one or more art forms. Dialogues is an occasional series of experimental and experiential exchanges between the visual and audible arts. The discourse is through improvisation: a free-style creative act that exists in the moment, in the instincts and intuitions of the individual, and in the participants’ reciprocal response to each other’s activities. (It may, but need not have, an audience.) Exchanges takes place within the ‘laboratory’ of the School of Art’s Project Room. It provides a controlled environment in which the collaborators can learn, invent, test concepts, devices, and methods, make trial of different models of practice, and record ideas. Two determinations govern the collaboration: action and consideration; (to make in order to understand and to understand what has been made).

For Dialogues4, Dafydd Roberts and John Harvey, together and independently, respond to the sound made by a printer’s drying rack. The layers of the rack were articulated from bottom to top. The binding and rubbing of its metal hinges created an eerie and reverberant screeching. This source sound is treated through a series of analogue and digital synthesizers in bid to explore and extend its sonic nature.

Instrumentation

Adobe Audition CS6
Apple MacBook Pro (x2)
Audiomulch
Eventide ModFactor
Eventide PitchFactor pedal
Eventide Time Factor pedal
Eventide Space pedal
FMR RNLA 7239 compressor and gate unit
Moog CP-251 Control Processor
Moog MF-101 Low Pass Filter
Moog MF-102 Ring Modulator
Moog MF-103 12-Stage Phaser
Moog MF-104M Analog Delay,
Moog MF-105 Midi Murf
Moog MF-108M Cluster Flux
OTO Biscuit,
Presonus Studiolive AR8 mixer
Sherman/Rodec Restyler
TC Electronic Nova Reverb pedal.

Context

Live Art: Dialogues4, The Project Room, School of Art, Aberystwyth University, November 12, 2016.

Source

Print drying rack, School of Art, Aberystwyth University, recorded and remixed October 20-22, 2016.

Sound recording of: This is One of the Most Useful Things