CISA–Materials, media & generative arts

materialism, also called physicalism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them.

Piano Transplants – Annea Lockwood

Annea Lockwood’s explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments have been shaped by a lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources. In works ranging from sound art and environmental sound installations to concert music, Lockwood’s work demonstrates the deep complexity that can be revealed within seemingly simple sounds. Her Piano Transplants (1968-72) are compositions in which pianos beyond repair were burned, drowned, and planted in an English garden. These iconic works became a testament to Lockwood’s focus on elemental and natural sound sources and interdisciplinary interventions, where the piano becomes played by its environmental and contextual circumstance. The presentations are celebrations of the reconfiguration of material, the transformation of objects, and the resulting multi-sensory performance that ensues.

So what made you think of burning a piano?

AL Richard Alston and I had worked together a couple
of times by that point, and we were just brainstorming
about making a piece called Heat in which we’d heat
up the space a lot so that the audience were sweating,
the dancers were sweating, everybody got really hot.
For this, I needed good fire sound and I tried recording
in a fireplace, but it was nothing. And so I made a bonfire
in the courtyard of the house I was living in, and that
wasn’t anything either. So I thought: ‘Well, I need to be
burning something that is bound to make some really
good sound.’ I think it was Wandsworth Council that had
a sort of piano graveyard in those days: old pianos which
people no longer wanted, damaged by damp and all
that sort of thing, could be dumped.

Have you ever tried to burn a grand piano? 
AL No, because I don’t see the point. For me it is about
the revelation of the interior structure as it burns. And if
you are watching a grand piano, you are not seeing that
happening: it is happening on the horizontal, and not the
vertical. It has to be vertical to be visible. And each harp
is a little bit different. They are all beautiful.
IR There is something about the tension of the beauty of it
and its iconoclasm. What is your thinking about that topic?
AL Yeah, true. You know, my conscious thinking was
pragmatic. A piano, a defunct piano, I thought: ‘we can
over-string the strings; they’re bound to pop if we’re lucky,
and they make a great sound when they pop, everything
else should sound good too.’ Below a conscious level,
I don’t know. I had grown up studying piano from an early
age, from about five, six or so, and I had still been studying
it while I was at the Royal College of Music, which I left in
1963, not long before doing this. And I loved studying the
piano, I love the instrument. Perhaps it was a severing of
a connection; but I don’t psychoanalyse it. The first piano
I wanted to record heat, the second piano I wanted to see
the beauty of it.

I dont really like it as I think let the piano burn is a bit waste of material. It sonically works great as we could hear every snippet of the bricks are being broken down/ put off. I think I personally prefer this one:

I like big installations made of multi-screens:

Paik believed that technology needed to be in harmony with nature. In his artwork TV Garden, he placed dozens of TV sets among a jungle of tropical plants. Viewers immersed themselves in this natural world while they watched the screens.

Paik noted that people would see plants and TVs together as a ‘paradox’. But, for him, this was all the more important to show that the two are connected.

Many people had thought that television is against ecology. But in this case, television is part of ecology.