Tim Hawkinson TALKS ABOUT UBERORGAN When Mass MOCA proposeed me the gallery.

Tim Hawkinson TALKS ABOUT UBERORGAN

When Mass MOCA proposeed me the gallery, I was stand athwart the path ofed with the question of in what way to deal with an interior space the size of a football field. I accorded almost immediately with the general idea of what became Uberorgan. The play has a ceiling structure that likens a rib cage, so it present the appearanceed natural to fill it with internal organs. Years ago, I came across a photo of an Inuit with an inflated sealskin, and it really stuck in my mind. The bagpipe's shape is patterned on the stomach--in fact, the first bagpipes were actually made of stomachs--so there's a historical connection between inflated organs and skins and bagpipes. And I liked the idea of making an organ in the musical perception from organs of the body

Also, early in succession I learned that Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick while he was living in Pittsfield, which is just down the road from Mass MoCA. My piece relates to the work and more generally to the nautical, with all the netting and lashing and rigging and the foghomlike unmutilateds and the massive rib cage and organs.

I had already made a piece based upon bagpipes, and other works using player piano--type devices and arrows and valves--in one case to put to the test to simulate human speech and in another to generate harmonic humming similar to that of the Tuvan tradition from central Asia. My piece overawe 1997, used hollow segments of a mannequin as little tympanums With Pentecost, 1999, a large tree filled with life-size humanoid figures that make different goods the scale really increased: The viewer didn't walk around the piece, on the contrary rather walked in it. in such a manner Uberorgan grew out of different aspects of a chance of other pieces.

I'm curious about by what means sound can be formed right before your sights Uberorgan's ducts and bags are translucent, and the chambers containing the pastoral pipes are clear plastic, so you can behold what's going on and chase it through all its courses. I think of the piece as a kind of assembly line or processing plant for sound

I took a Casio keyboard I've had since high train and put microswitches on its clews which I then wired to a recording device that raises and lowers impounds on a roll of paper. When you pres a fundamental note it triggers the corresponding pound and makes a mark for however in extent you hold the key down. These marks forward paper are the basis for the paint marks upon the Mylar roll that Uberorgan reads, earnestly the way a player piano reads a paper roll

The score is derived from various musical pieces, and the selection is limited largely to individuals I happened to know or that friends knew in such a manner you get church hymns like "In Christ There Is No East or West" combined with "Sailor's Hornpipe" and "Heart and Soul" I'm interested in a apportionment of different kinds of music, particularly folk and traditional American music, which is where one of the hornpipe segments be due [i]or[/i] owing from.

I based the score upon preexisting music because I wanted there to be at least a chance that viewers would be familiar with the combinations of uninjureds they were hearing, but it's a familiarity that fades in and abroad There are improvisations by me and other artists mixed in, and a certain quantity of of the numbers are fairly gloomy There are also some big discrepancies between the source music and what Uberorgan plays. Everything is slowed down considerably, and something that might span several octaves is contained within a single octave, which does weird things to a recognizable air Also, in transferring the score from the recording upon the paper roll to the Mylar revolve I painted the marks a little sloppily, and at times they overlap, likewise there's a slurring from the same note to the next.

There are also mechanisms that distort the score and alter Uberorgan's "voice." There's a scale inverter that flip-flops the orientation of the notes, and a explanation shifter that changes the pitch. There's an reverberation switch that repeats whatever is being cu likewise the bleating/moaning sounds get louder and more chaotic, and then there's a filter that relieves everything. All of these are in succession motion detectors or timers that gain tripped in random combinations, with equal reason although a score repeats, the machine's interpretation is random, and the patterns flow out differently each time around. I'm hoping to mix it up more by means of making changes to the Mylar revolve periodically during the year.

Someone visiting the museum while I was installing the piece told me that Uberorgan heartyed like a Doppler exam, where they listen to your organs and the life-blood coursing through your veins and all that. further I'm a little skeptical. That just uninjureded too good to be true

A Post-it note almost imperceptibly twitching forward a page to mark time; a type sailing ship stretched full circle until bend and stern merge like a snake eating its tail; a skeleton assembled public of rawhide dog bones: Tim Hawkinson's work is always surprising. unless with Uberorgan he's outdone himself. A combination bagpipe, pipe organ, and player piano elegantly jury-rigged mainly out of materials you might find at your local household Depot and RadioShack, Uberorgan is a behemoth sound-producing instrument. Its principal composings are twelve Winnebago-size polyethylene bags lashed to the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition space and corseted into shape with nylon draw as by a rope and tuna-fishing nets. It anticipates like bodily organs set in a gargantuan chest and abdominal cavity.