In Memory of Their Feelings
The Substation, Wits School of Arts, 2009
Interactive media, Physical computing, Design, Sound art
In collaboration with Alex Opper (Designer), Leonard Russell (Carpenter) and Tom Varghese (Engineer)
In Memory of Their Feelings formed Reddiar’s final MA project/exhibition. It consists of a functional table that is augmented by electronics and digital technology which facilitates responsive interactive media (sound), and in addition to this, houses CAD sculptural objects. The poem, In Memory of Their Feelings by Susan Sontag was recorded for this project and cut up into excerpts. The Stanzas entitled Spoon, Knife and Fork, are triggered when a participant opens the drawer with the respective sculptural object.
Tables of Uncomfortable Contents: Reading Between the Lines
A recent collaborative project I was invited to contribute to, as architect and designer, was Wayne Reddiar’s digital interactive project, In Memory of Their Feelings (2009). The work uses a table as support for and manifestation of his driving idea: the interactive furniture piece houses and – through user prompts – reveals recordings of selected parts of a peom by Susan Sontag, from which the work borrows its title. In the work, Sontag’s ode to John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Jasper Johns is sonically reconfigured and “stored” within the three drawers of Reddiar’s table. Selected parts of the original poem, in the form of performed voice recordings, are emitted by the table when tits drawers are opened or closed by the user. The indeterminacy of te rlayed sequences and their combinations of parts of the poem’s five stanza’s draw the curious user into the collaborative and participatory domain of the work. These audio-stanzas – programmed and technically embedded into the physical table – are played back depending on which or how many of the drawers the user opens and closes. Thus the textual “contents” of the table are “unlocked” and “read,” via sonic jump-cuts, in a combined haptic-audio translation of Jean-Luc Godard’s pioneering experiments with sudden and unexplained shifts in his films. Sontag’s stanzas are titled: The Knife, The Fork, The Spoon, Symmetries; and The Knife, Fork and Spoon. My involvement was to advise on the translation of the everyday objects of the table and cutlery into a convincing haptic-tectonic form. I proposed an inversion of the “feeling” of the objects: a cold (metallic) table, reversing the user’s expectation of a familiar warm surface; and war (wooden) cutlery, negating the functional expectations we ordinarily attach to these everyday tool. I posited these suggestions as a conceptual underpinning of the Dadaist roots of the three protagonists of Sontag’s poem, to compliment Reddiar’s intention of creating “a ‘prepared table’... [w]here here the [collaborating] participant through interaction may experience a unique sequence of ‘cut-up’ text"."
Taken From: Art South Africa: Vol 09, Issue 03, Autumn 2011, by Alexander Opper (University of Johannesburg)