Feedback solos no. 2 & 3
Electric guitars, amplifiers, guitar leads, Elam Projectspace Gallery
Dimensions variable
Installed at Elam Projectspace B431, 
Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland
Feedback solos no. 2 & 3
Electric guitars, amplifiers, guitar leads, Elam Projectspace Gallery
Dimensions variable
Installed at Elam Projectspace B431, Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland

Two electric guitars explored the nascent acoustic properties of Elam's Projectspace Gallery, their strings having been electronically tuned to frequencies derived from its physical proportions.1 The guitars produced feedback which was doubly site specific – the product of a perpetual negotiation between the space's unchanging architectural properties (from which their initial tuning was derived) and the shifting temperature and humidity within the space over the course of the installation (which effected the consistency of this tuning and subsequently the pitch of the feedback produced). The space came to function dialectically; a (proportionally) stable setting and as a site of continual flux, tending always to toward synthesis in the form of the feedback produced by the two instruments.


Upon perception, the two sets of feedback interacted and were experienced as rhythm. If viewers were stationary the volume of the tones appeared constant, however, as they moved through the space, and through the peaks and troughs of the standing waves within it, the intensity of the sonic field created by the work shifted and changed.



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1 Before installation, the strings of the guitars were tuned to notes derived from the axial modes of Projectspace B431, one in relation to the furtherest wall-to-wall length, and the other to the other length.