Trimpin
30 Nov
Sound and electronic artist Trimpin (New Yorker profile) came in to talk to my video art class, and we did a short little performance on the spot that turned out to be similar to one of his early pieces. We brought in various sound-making objects and as Trimpin tapped on the keys of a typewriter, we made our sounds for our respective keys. It was fun, if a bit imprecise, as fleshy humans are known to be… I think I might use the footage of the typewriter for an unrelated video.
Afterward, he talked to us about his work, which he thinks of mainly as sound art, but which usually involves complex set-ups of analog and digital objects assembled to be interactively auditory. The most memorable one for me was also the silliest – he tells of finding a cannister of recording wire and, unable to find a player for this obsolete technology, of outfitting a small unicycle clown toy with a little backpack holding a tiny amplifier speaker with a the head from a record player trailing behind the clown. He then held the wire taut across a room and let the clown cycle down its length, playing what was recorded on the wire as it went, with varying levels of intelligibility depending on speed. That to me is a great example of how simply we can alter and rework technologies and presentation of media if we just thought hard enough (creatively enough?) about it.
In a similar work, he makes metal shavings, mixes them with alcohol and paints the stuff onto a regular sheet of paper. After it dries, he uses a record head from a record player attached to a mic to record his voice onto the paper by simply moving the head across it. Viewers can then use a play head to move across the paper and hear his voice on headphones. So simple! I love these little things more than his large scale projects, the most widely known one being the guitar sculpture in the Experience Music Project in Seattle. The smaller projects seem less about impressiveness than about illuminating underlying principles, which to me has always been the more striking experience. So what if something is huge and expensive if it doesn’t really change your perception of things, doesn’t give you a new way of looking at things?
For him the week was a week of giving slideshows all over campus multiple times per day, and he seemed to appreciate the more active, spontaneous (and noisy!) interaction in our class. Next quarter, he’s co-teaching a course with Terry Berlier to build a bunch of the structures that will be used in the performance of Gurs Zyklus in May, and I’m really hoping to be in it. Terry’s teaching my sculpture class this term and is a fun instructor – the two of them together is irresistible. I hope I signed up in time. His description of the project is utterly discombobulating in the best way: fire organ, water drops spelling out names, steam, sound… !!
