After the success of the first switchless installation at TAA we were invited to use some space at the next gallery showing. Now that we had modularised the switchless technology we decided to be ambitious and try to setup two separate spaces. The location for this exhibition was perfect - 200 metres from the Tate Modern gallery in central London and right in the heart of Englands banking districts. As before this exhibition was organised with little money but a lot of energy from all those groups involved. We felt privileged to be given space and to participate in what was to become a very successful 3 days exhibition.
Our rooms were the first encountered when entering the building and we purposefully chose the darkest and most dungeonlike of the spaces. There was a large amount of remaing junk in the space from when the location had been used as a pub storeroom, so the first day was spent clearing out the space. Some of the piping, pumps and electronics were left in the rooms though as we felt they complimented the switchless aesthetic.
The first room was quite tunnel like with a stone wall feeling, at the end of the main space were two arches which split the space quite nicely. In each of these arches was installed a switchless module, and although we used the same hardware as in the Funeral Parlour we spent some time creating new sounds and textures to have controlled by the switches. Using the previously contructed modules allowed us to spend the rest of our setup time installing more situation dependant hardware. As can be seen in the photo's of this room the main arch at the end of the first room had large metal letters assembled as a "title" for this supposed art. The name came about not through deep pseudo-artistic pondering, but rather the neccessity that this was the most appropriate statement which could be made with materials we found around us, namely the rusty old letters. This we feel is a main theme running through all of the switchless installations, and so the first titled switchless was born, under the name eND aRt NoW.
Most of the sound was generated in realtime again, so the public could control the sounds through playing with the switches. The majority of the sounds were synthesised this time, the atmosphere matched the feel of the installation well - very spooky and unsettling. Here are some examples of how it sounded:
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The large mains electricity switch which had caught many peoples attention at the first exhibition was used again, this time it was complimented by some additional lighting of the title letters and again it created quite a lot of confusion among people who were wary of touching such an industrial looking switch. Society has after all conditioned all of us to only allow specialists to use hardware other than that spoon fed to us by the consumer ideology. The modules had their own lights in the form of LEDs on the front and strobes fitted inside, all under the control of switches and therefore users had quite a lot of lighting to play with.
One of the most popular parts of this room was installed at the other end of the room, some called them noise showers, I can only try to describe them. Speakers were fixed at the end of tubes big enough to almost put your head in and as per usual disturbing noise was supplied to the speakers. Using the form of light switch which British people commonly have in a bathroom, the one which has a piece of string hanging down to control the light switch, the user could stand underneath the tube and blast themselves with noise. This was one of the most interesting things which people found to play with in the first room and many people whiled away sometime with their heads stuck in tube being battered by noise.
To the left of the first room was a second even darker space which was protected by a huge security door, which immediately made the room feel quite imposing. The more visual members of the collective decorated the room with some fantastic black and white visuals. Some of these were hand painted in situ and some were photocopy chaos. The whole space gained a very organic feel over a few days, with additions being made to the visuals as the exhibition ran. Lighting in this room was simpler but there were still a few switches dotted around the place although due to technical reasons we did not achieve as much sound interaction as we first planned. There were however two computer screens running some old software which cycled a constantly changing image across the displays. With the space left between these two screens the initally quite simple visual became quite entrancing.