The Echo Project
Brandon LaBelle
The Echo project is an installation as audio guide for a crowd. And at the same time it’s a private conversation: with you, as one of 20 people in a room, a sort of public intimacy.
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The Echo project is an installation as audio guide for a crowd. And at the same time it’s a private conversation: with you, as one of 20 people in a room, a sort of public intimacy.
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?
The club as a community and a site for performed politics: deep/ queer house, vogue femme, lipsync and ballroom.
Three intimate 45 minute sessions, readings of your political questions – using Tarot, Palmistry, Reiki, Astrology, and Philosophy, and the invented methods of Fake and Political Therapy.
Laser beam sine tones used to draw delicate, abstract patterns by vibrating charcoal, placed atop of a great strip of paper running through the gallery; beautiful, fragile sound-created autonomous drawing.
Disused railway turning circle at east end of Union Terrace Gardens, a historically public space at the centre of a regeneration land-grab for the private gain of a local petro-chemical magnate.
Everyday objects and materials (rubber bands, paper, a sink, microphones) disabused of their inertia and made to speak for themselves in a kind of focusing in on the tiny, repetitive, almost unobserved (sonic/ visual) potential of everyday things put into motion.
Writing that shows us that, even in struggle, there is light to be let in.
Databases carry the same seeds of creativity that early documentary makers saw in film. Both can empower people by helping them to master information, both can be claimed to represent some kind of reality or truth.
Deliberately blurred drones, absent of definite structure or rhythm, framed in silence and devoid of any distraction from the pure matter of sound.
The site of the former Abbeyhill Station on the 1903 Leith branch of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith railway, overgrown and leading to as yet un-regenerated ‘wasteland’; taxi’s for 80 people, each instructed to take different routes between locations and; a slice of land concealed behind corporate business park branding off the Wester Approach Rd, apparently of no conceivable use and named ‘Chateaux de Scum’ by those who use it anyway.
Glasgow. Power electronic klutz behaviour by Kovorox sound head-honcho. Bruised bodies and broken microphones.