Users are invited to pick up a paint bucket, and place it in the Filling Station. There, they can take their photo and see it flow in to the bucket. Once that is done, they can throw their painted face all over the wall..

Paint drips and flows across the wall, revealing the many faces of previous players.

Phones can also be used to throw paint – either by blowing, flicking or swiping on the screen. It was first shown at Nokia World, London 2010.

The installation is also featured in the TV advert for the N8. See below for more media..

(See also The Source, Wave, Bloom and Railings)

Ten plinths are arranged around an open space at the centre. Each plinth has a wooden frame on top of it, enclosing a square of urban material: a slab of concrete, gravel, recycled plastic, stainless steel, brick, water, glass, wire mesh and stone. Each element is labeled, describing the material and its provenance: “Concrete, 30cms x 30cms, Dublin High Street.”

It is as if we had wandered around a city, cutting sections from the urban environment and brought these fragments inside for exhibition.

When touched or examined, the elements create music with the sound emanating from within the plinth itself. Each element creates a part of the sound environment and every experience is unique, as our generative programme creates new compositions based on location, pressure and duration.

The sound environment that is generated has many facets. Some elements involved very contemporary sound patterns, taken from dance music. Others created vocal parts, snatched from local conversation. As people explore and play them they create the whole: a sonic representation of Dublin, created by the materials of its making, formed into a contemporary, ever changing urban sound environment.

Exhibited

• Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts, USA, 1999
• Akademie der Kunste, Germany, 1999
• Guinness Store House, Dublin, 2000
• V&A Museum, London, 2003

Visitors to the installation space are requested to think of a word. Any word at all. They are handed a white cube, which they hold. As they speak their word in to the box, the box begins to glow with a gentle blue light.

They are then invited to explore what appears to be a large empty space, delineated by a red line around its edges. As they wander off in to this area they realise that in fact, invisible to the eye, there is a rich sonic environment to explore, full of words that are nestling amongst trees, flitting around pools of water, or hiding out in caves.

Some of these words live here permanently, and some have been dropped by people walking through the space. If the visitor wants to do this, they simply tip over their box, the light drains away, and their word falls out, living in that area for several hours, for others to discover.. When they are done, they return the box, to be filled by another word.

These observation stations are positioned so that the telescope head faces the view. Similar to an observation point at a natural beauty spot, each telescope is freely moveable in two planes and can be directed at any portion of the facing elements of the view. Their function is clear and a small step is provided for children.

Visitors are invited to use these elements to view the cityscape, to gently swivel the telescope to focus on different parts of the urban environment.

As the viewer scans their telescopic view across the cityscape, a unique sound environment is generated, relating to the specific point of focus. It is as if by looking at each are of the view one could hear the localized sounds being emitted at that point: a sound x-ray. Sounds are mapped onto fixed points within the geographical reality of the individual site. The architectural features of the buildings, bridges, pavements and sky all have their own signature sound within the overall aural palette. These sounds emerge from the telescope itself at a level that remains discreet and only fully appreciated by the user.

The installation explores the relationship between the physical and the ephemeral layers of an urban environment. The telescope allows the visible fixed physical realities of the urban landscape to be experienced alongside a normally hidden and lost transient sound history. The work of art enriches the experience that people passing-by have of their particular urban surround.

A hidden camera records the space and its inhabitants the mirror like screen becoming the visual palette for an altered version of the captured reality. The volume of people, their movements and their spatial relationships generate the ‘treatment’ of the final piece. Watch yourself literally melt into the crowd, before bursting into fire and cruising down the street aflame.

Elements of the composition, which are static, can be treated very differently from those that move; moving people can become swarms of flies, with no solidity, whilst fixed or static elements remain solid even when behind a moving crowd.

As the installation moves through its programmed visual experiments, blue plasma streams through talking lips and trails gesticulating hands, people are reduced to ASCII text where cigarette smoke is transformed into strings of text and people appear to burst into flame.

Urban Sketches has been permanently installed in the SONY flagship store in New York (2001) and in the 360 Degree Gallery in London’s award-winning Sketch bar and restaurant (2003).