The second section reveals that each of these ideas are actually installations greyworld have built, each one created somewhere in the world.

And the final section has speeches, transcripts and an essay by Dr. Charlie Gere about the artists.

The book is hardback, 64 pages, and beautifully illustrated throughout..

For a partial preview and to order a copy, visit the greyworld.org/store

A press release is here

We tuned the railings so that when you ran a stick along them they played “the Girl from Ipanema.”

Created without permissionsin cities around Europe, many versions have dissapeared. But some still remain.

To find them, all you need is a stick.

The project began nine years ago, as an ongoing art scheme in urban areas. Originally, the awards were installed without permission, appearing over night in areas of outstanding sonic importance.

In order that the plaques may be seen by many, the awards are now installed permanently, and their locations listed in the Sound Award logs that can be visited online.

For more information visit: www.soundawards.org

Soundaward 79 [Audio]

The entire town of Burnley has become a canvas for magical paintings that appear and disappear throughout the day and night. Some as big as a house, others as small as a door, these paintings reveal a hidden side of Burnley, offering viewers the opportunity to explore the town in a whole new light.
It is the first of up to seven works of art across the UK to be revealed as part of the Big Art Project, an ambitious UK wide public art commissioning initiative. The documentary following the development of “Invisible” will be shown every Sunday in May 2009, on Channel Four. For more information, click here.

A map of the location is here.
Big Art podcast [Audio]

Traveling free and happy in their natural environment, they move and flock, drifting across the space. They frolic with the other species that inhabit their world, exploring their plaza.

Each bin or bench has its own personality and impulses – if it’s raining a bench may decide to park up under a tree waiting for someone to sit on it; whilst on a Wednesday the bins will line up waiting to be emptied. Occasionally, they will all burst into song with the bins forming a baritone barbershop quintet and the benches a high soprano choir.

The work of art was completed in July 2006 and was a permanent feature outside the Junction Theatre in Cambridge for several years.

Austrian Radio Interview [Audio]

It is not clear what kind of game was played here. As they move across the warped wooden floor of the playground the sounds of the players, their encouragements and successes are woven into a gentle ambiance – all created by their motion in the area.

The playground is flanked by seating on either side. As with the playground the seating is also a gateway into retrieving the past sounds of the area. When sat or leant on, they unlock the sound of the spectators watching the game, their conversations, cheers and applause.

The installation was completed in August 1999 and is open to the public seven days a week.

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

The work of art occupies the full height of the building’s central 10-storey atrium. It uses hundreds of flowers, hidden within a seemingly sober column suspended within the space, to allow the building to bloom into life. A vibrant core at the centre of these buildings that reflects the dynamic activity within the surrounding offices.

The installation responds to the motion of people as they enter the atrium or travel up in the glass lift that dominates this space. In this way, people moving around the building can directly influence their environment. The installation is also affected by different light levels in the space, so as the sun shines the flowers gently bloom, opening their petals up to the sunlight. At quieter periods throughout the day the sculpture generates patterns based on an infinite library of forms, ensuring that the work of art is an elegant ever-changing heart at the centre of the building.

The Greenwich Foot Tunnel was the first installation in a public space to use the Layer system. We had been experimenting with different ways to articulate these transit spaces, from purely analogue methods of sound capture and distortion, to more complex means of digesting movement and form.

A long blue carpet was installed in the dark tunnel running underneath the Thames. Tiny sensors beneath the carpet detected the direction, weight and speed of pedestrians as they passed along its length and translated this information into a generatively produced sound environment. An album – ‘Various Walkers’ was created by recording these performances.

The installation was commissioned by the London Docklands Commission and sponsored by the Daily Telegraph.

The Layer has undergone many changes since the Greenwich foot tunnel. These allow both a wider range of inputs to be used, such as colour and shape as well as a large range of expressive outputs, such as light and generative display. Essentially though, it is the legibility of the installation to a broad public that remains paramount to us.

The work of art was also installed along the Millennium Bridge that runs across the Liffey in Dublin, Ireland. It gave pedestrians crossing an opportunity to create and interact, simply by passing through the space. The installation was a counterpoint to another work of art, which we installed in the Guinness Storehouse.

We installed a bright blue carpet along the bridge, to signify that something was different in the centre of Dublin. We then embedded sensors in the carpet that responded to each footstep across the bridge, generating unexpected sounds and melodies – a plaintive piano phrase or the sounds of footsteps crunching through snow or sploshing through puddles.

Exhibited

• Greenwich Foot Tunnel, July 1997
• Millennium Bridge, Dublin, December 2000

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.