Rude Mechanic :: Beaconsfield Art Gallery
Rude Mechanic
In 1996 a symbiotic relationship was set up in the public gallery space of Beaconsfield between visual artists David Crawforth and Hayley Newman and sound artists Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen – Pan Sonic. All four worked daily for five weeks linked by sound inputs and outputs. The live installation featured an industrial power climber, a video oscilloscope, Pan Sonic’s precious sound machine, the typewriter, and the original prototype for turbosound’s earth-shaking floodlight PA system. Rude mechanicals were unskilled assistants used in early medical operations who performed rudimentary tasks such as restraining and muffling un-anaesthetised patients as well as catching their dismembered body parts and fluids in buckets. Using this occupation as a motif, Crawforth and Newman inhabited and evolved the physical environment and Pan Sonic monitored the sounds of that activity, feeding in their own analogue compositions.
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