Well, not news as such, more old news. But I forgot to put this up before, so here it is now.
Kathy Hinde - Piano Migrations (2010). Photo Credit: Kathy Hinde.
Last year I was extremely lucky to interview sound-artist (and fellow Bristolian) Kathy Hinde for the journal Stage Screen Sound. Kathy makes extraordinarily beautiful work that ranges over installations, participatory events, happenings, and live performances. Her work engages with the core of the contemporary human experience, from the climate emergency to data culture. You can read the interview online HERE (starting p.164).
I first met Kathy when I first moved to the South West back in 2017. Prior to that I had only come to know her through her work, ostensibly Piano Migrations (2010, above). Here, a flock of birds is projected on the body of a grand piano, hung on a wall. Far from being dead, however, the instruments twitters, twitches and sings, as computer-controlled agitators and tappers flick and strike the strings at the precise point the digital birds appear to land.
When I first stood in front of the work the piano looked liked like something like a carcass, stripped and skinned, hung up as if in a butchers shop. It looked quite dead. The birds, in contrast, seemed very much alive, skittering and fluttering across its surface. But as your attention moves from the visual to the sonic, the piano suddenly becomes very much alive, clinking and clattering with constant bursts of energy. The strings and their vibrations are there in the room. Once this is realised, now it’s the birds who seem dead. The ‘liveness’ of the piano rendering them tangibly as digital avatars. The birds aren’t there but the piano is.
It was with Piano Migrations that Kathy’s practice of repurposing her installations as instruments began in 2010, operating the mechanical agitators herself, live, via a Max patch. And it was this interrelation of installation and performance that I wanted to pick at as I met with Kathy (remotely) during the UK’s third national lockdown in Spring 2021.
You can read the full interview online HERE.
Matthew