Musak

Greyworld are a collective of London based artists who are interested in public-activated art, sculpture and interactive installations. Although often varied in their approach, their work is typically subtle, environmentally reflective and requests special attention. Although they have built up a rich history of acclaimed works since their formation in 1993, their most celebrated piece, so far, is probably The Source a permanent installation for the new London Stock Exchange: A cube of 9x9x9 (729 in total) spherical balls are suspended on cables that run the full 32 metres height of the main atrium of the newly designed building. These spheres, controlled by a computer running Python scripts, can move themselves independently of each other, forming dynamic shapes, characters and fluid-like motions that reflects the nature of the stock market itself. The sculpture opens the market each morning at 8am, with the spheres breaking free from their default cube arrangement to form elegant patterns and shapes. Throughout the day the sculpture responds to reputable news feed and displays snapshots of the current headlines, written in full height of the atrium. At the end of each day’s trading the spheres return to their cubed arrangement, resting on the sculpture’s base, and blue lights inside each sphere are illuminated to show the stock market’s closing price with an arrow to indicate how the market performed on that particular day. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II unveiled the sculpture on the 27 July 2004 and the opening was broadcast to a global audience. The installation is broadcast every morning on television to an estimated global audience of 80 million people. Their first interactive public work of art was a series of temporary installations, Railings (1996), first created in Paris and widely copied. In each case the artists took a set of ordinary street railings and tuned them so that when you run a stick or an umbrella along them, rather than making the 'clack-clack-clack' sound as expected, they played The Girl from Ipanema. Bridge 2 by Greyworld, on the Millennium Bridge, DublinMost of their early installations were sound based. In 2000, they took the Millennium Bridge which spans the Liffey River in Dublin, Ireland, and installed a bright blue carpet across its length. Embedded into the carpet were hundreds of tiny sensors that translated the motion of people crossing the bridge into a vibrant soundscape. One moment it sounded as if people were walking through crunchy snow, the next that they were sploshing through water, or walking across fallen leaves. This installation, entitled Bridge 2, drew on ideas that Greyworld had explored in a previous work of art Playground, installed in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the U.K. Visitors to the sculpture park stumbled across what looked like a deserted playground with faded markings for mysterious games and benches for spectators. All the elements of the installation, the floor of the playground and the accompanying benches, were sensitised with tiny sensors so that as people crossed the floor they triggered the sound of people playing a game whilst as others sitting on the bench found themselves immersed in the sound of spectators cheering and clapping. The installation is a permanent feature of the sculpture park. Trace by Greyworld, at Hampton Court Palace, EnglandTrace (2005) is a work created for the Maze at Hampton Court Palace, UK. Drawing on its history and on the idea of the maze as a place of furtive conversation and flirtation, Greyworld have created a gentle soundwork that affects the visitors’ experience of their journey from entrance to the centre and back again. As visitors pass through the many green corridors of the maze, they are tempted to follow tantalising sounds - a fragment of music, a snatch of laughter, the seductive rustle of fine silks or the whispers of an illicit conversation as it disappears around a corner and into a dead-end. Slowly the sounds weave together in the visitors mind to create a rich tapestry of the other people who have passed through the maze over the centuries and lost themselves in the seductive privacy of its secluded corners. Later that year they also created Bins and Benches a permanent installation for a public square in Cambridge, U.K. – a group of animated street-furniture that roams free, like buffalo in the urban savannah of their square. When it rains the benches seek shelter under the nearby trees, inviting people to sit on them. As the temperature drops the bins start to shiver and when the sun shines the bins and benches break into song, singing in tight barbershop harmonies. Above all the bins and benches are still functional pieces of street furniture waiting for people to come and sit on them or deposit rubbish in their lids. Worldbench by Greyworld, in various sites around the worldWorldbench (2005) is their most recent installation that uses a park bench to link up locations across the world. It takes an ordinary wooden bench and places up against a screen, placed on a wall, in the school’s playground. Reflected on the screen is the mirror image of the bench, disappearing into the distance; but whilst one side of the bench is in South London the other is in the far north of the country in Sunderland.

Cfr. n. Arch. 183.29, 184.34 ZERO is a limited edition collection of one-minute soundworks by international sound artists, experimental composers, noise makers and other audio creators. Contributors were invited to create an original recording of one-minute duration for the CD on the theme of ZERO – whether through their stripped-down, low-tech aesthetic or a focus on themes of absence, abstraction, distortion or a sense of thereshold between one state and another. The CD contains a broad variety of one-minute soundworks and presents the results of artists working thematically in chance juxtaposition. By bringing together this calibre and range of contributions, ZETRO aims to stimulate further interest in the artist work and practice, debate and dialogue surrounding sound art. The artists on ZERO range from well known world figures, to individuals and groups making their first wirks in this field. ZERO was commisioned by the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) and was published with the support from Liverpool Art School.