4D piano + No Bicycle Wheel
/ a work at WCH Assemblage #2 黃竹坑聚疊（二）/ on until 22 September 2015 @ Floating Projects
I reorganized some of my tools for a future performance happening also in Wong Chuk Hang into a 4D piano. A main idea of Floating Projects is an ever-changing space and, for me, it is a kind of material-efficiency in making an artwork. Everything is reusable here. No Bicycle Wheel is in fact my favorite object in this space… I often connect my electronics instrument to play along with it. The speaker I used here was also used as an element in another art project in another exhibition. The aftermath is usually unknown to the audience, which I think is an interesting aspect of discovery to them. The piano, just as other things we used here, had its own past stories, now layered and not readily readable, were you casually looking or deliberately interacting with the artwork.
One thing, though, I don’t know what the butterflies were for. If you owned them, please tell any of us at FP.
4D piano:
Wing opened up the idea of hacking this particular piano that Hoi used for other projects. Realizing that the piano was already featured in WCH Assemblage #1, I would like to use it to show the ever-changing character of the space of Floating Projects. The whole idea was about things “obsolete.” We found a box of butterflies, each with hidden Theremin technology graved in. This led to the use of electronics in my work, which then seemed to make the piano kind of obsolete. Now in my 4D piano, both the electronics and the physical piano are being “forgotten” in a way. The camera, too, is obsolete – it is a camera once used by my family, which had captured a lot of my memories, now turned into a sound device to fulfill my need of making an assemblage. I don’t use a film camera like this anymore. There is actually an ipod doing the sound-track of the bicycle wheel. An ipod was once the most popular and hyped item during the first decade of 2000s, right before the iphone came out. I remember showing the ipod to one of my students and he simply did not know how to use it. The click wheel is low-tech compared to a touch screen. It is obsolete now. We are indeed surrounded by technologies that once created a trend and brought about cultural changes. We wouldn’t wait to upgrade our gears to the latest and the next best even if they are still functional. Many objects of technology were made obsolete by us. Just as we are still enjoying a great deal of 2D movies, we also greedily move into 3D movies, then 4D movies… Do we really need a 4D piano?
No Bicycle Wheel:
Inspired by Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1951), my work is a tribute to his work in the form of a virtual- and sound-art equivalent, perhaps also a “reproduction” of Bicycle Wheel. Duchamp had great interest in the theme of “repetition.” In this attempt, I simply repeat his idea by applying simple audio technology. I have kept the idea of the “ready-made” by using royalty- free sound online.
I remembered watching a video, an interview with British artist Brian Eno by Ron Arad in which Eno talked about his act of putting urine with a tube to Duchamp’s Fountain in an exhibition. By “pissing” into it, Eno intended to bring the urinal to its original status as an ordinary object. He addressed the issue of how Dada art like Duchamp’s failed in the contemporary world as people treated them too seriously.
As I turned the Bicycle Wheel into a sound work, I retained an aspect of the classic example of the “readymade” and you can actually sit on it.
