shelflife by visitor

SkipBox is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever made. It’s a 5-channel video / 10-channel audio project and sculpture. I designed and fabricated a console, mixing/recording apparatus for it and shot hours of footage of myself skipping rope around large pieces of public art and temporary pieces of street construction.

I had microphones in my shoes and on my collar. One would pick up the percussive rhythms of the different surfaces I skipped on while the other recorded my breathing, little mantras I’d repeat or vocalizations I’d make. These would then each be routed to mixers that people interacting with the sculpture could manipulate. Additionally, I had built a little recording deck into the SkipBox console surface–so, blank cassettes could be purchased from the gallery to record mixes of the work as they were generated by visitors.

Each of the 5 channels of video has its own, independent set of video clips–and no two clips are of a matching duration. Each clip is as long as it had to be to skip full-circle around whatever was being skipped around. Each channel is also looped, so the image/sound structure is perpetually randomized.

I still have a small edition of different tapes that I made with the machine available. I’ll add them to the store one of these days. Each tape is signed and numbered. The artwork is inked sneaker and jumprope on paper.

The sculpture and a tiny collection of the vids are below. Sadly, the quicktime lacks the audio distortion that the amp in the sculpture provides. Sadlier, the clips are also microscopic, so you lose a lot of the sense of scale and setting that make all of the featured skipjects so beautiful.

I don’t really recall the context of the request–which isn’t unusual of anything involving Dylan Nyoukis, but I was asked to provide Chocolate Monk with an album of my tracks. Tracks? What the fuck?

I don’t know how exactly Dylan was made aware that I’d been recording anything. I may have slipped him a CD-R at a show at the Knitting Factory that he was in town for, but for the life of me, I have no recollection of the details on this one.

So, tracks… I had these microcassette tapes I had been recording. They were analog synth and vocal experiments. There were two distinct avenues I was exploring–pedal processing (usually just delay and phase) and pedal/synth processing, but in both cases, the fundamental signal being manipulated was just voice–none of this bleep-bloop synth stuff. I wanted to keep everything human.

I pulled together a set of tracks–evenly split between the two concepts I’d been playing with. I named each track for the designer of a chair that best suited the sounds. Dylan actually released it. I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve only ever performed the material live once–at the No Fun Fest. It was a battle between Mokinox and Glamorous Pat. We both ended up naked in a room full of a couple-hundred confused onlookers. I had an inverted crucifix taped to my dick and was smashing Jesus on a contact mic. I lost him that night–Jesus. I still have the cross, but I don’t think it’s technically a crucifix anymore if ol’ J.C.’s given up the ghost.

A little-known tidbit is that the interstitial, title and credit noise on the FUN FROM NONE No Fun Fest DVDs I did for Load Records is from the unreleased Mokinox cassette, Cherbourg.

STARCK.MP3

VAN DER ROHE.MP3