Structure Study VI
2019
3 drummers mimic and perform compilations of youtube videos; multi-channel videos projected on walls.
size variable
video play time 24:53 minutes
Drummers:
John Stephenson (文正錆)
Watanabe Hiroto (渡邊紘人）
Yifang Lee (李宜舫)
Drumming is one of the oldest forms of music, one that can be seen all across cultures from shamanic rituals to signaling devices in warfares. The act of hitting objects to make sounds is also one of the most fundamental and earliest ways of how humans understand the world around them. In Structure Study VI, three drummers are tasked with mimicking the sound of three different compilations of found youtube videos with their drums. These found videos are various seemingly random recordings of different situations in life where drum-like sounds are made, primarily through speed and impact, by interactions between objects, animals, or naturally occurring phenomenons. For example: car crashes, earthquakes, factory machines operating, mining explosions, animals running, lightning. and gun fights. In the end the original found videos and video recordings of the drummers’ interpretations through drums are projected side by side onto six screens with each with separate speakers to create a symphony of cacophony.
Structure Study VI is a work that processes and explores the material oriented world that we live in: a world where every little interaction between objects and living organisms becomes part of the larger vibrations that makes up the foundation of life. Also, in our time, everything that has ever happened is now constantly being uploaded and shared simultaneously and excessively on the internet, allowing each vibration to echo forever through time and space. By ritualistically returning (translating) all these video recordings on youtube back into one of the most primitive ways of human sound making, like a type of somatic data processors, the world becomes music again.
This work was created as part of the exhibition Ambush
