'It was a swimming pool awash with teddy bears, postboxes that read letters back to you and even a media virus'
Scanner
It was a quiet Saturday afternoon in South London when the telephone rang. I playfully answered with "Scanner Pizza" only to discover the voice of Artangel's Michael Morris expressing interest in collaborating with me on a project. Still blushing, I listened to him inviting me to create the first of the "InnerCity" projects, exploring the resonance's of the urban sprawl of London.
Taking a year to develop Surface Noise was many abandoned adventures: at junctures it was to be a way to control the lighting systems of the Docklands business district from afar, it was a swimming pool awash with teddy bears, postboxes that read letters back to you and even a media virus, Godzilla, that devoured the data of all central London office computers.
It resolved itself into a sound tour on a red double-decker bus. Making a route determined by overlaying the sheet music from London Bridge is Falling Down onto a map of London, I recorded the sounds and images at points where the notes fell on the cityscape. These co-ordinates provided the score for the piece and by using software that translated images into sound and original source recordings, I was able to mix the work live on each journey through a speaker system we installed throughout the bus, as it followed the original walk shuttling between Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral.
My work has always explored the relationship between sound and architectural space and the spaces in between information, places, history, relationships, the places where one has to fill in the missing parts to complete the picture. The public nature of this work brought together a mixture of people who have all learnt to look at a city in a manner in which they have almost become blind to it through familiarity, revealing another layer of skin, peeling the surface away. It attempted to transform the everyday into something baffling and intriguing, taking the ordinary and seemingly benign and making it extraordinary.
Like the wow and flutter of a needle on a record, I am interested in the distillation of sound into acoustic disturbance, collapsing the legibility of a city into a fresh texture. Through the brief space of a bus journey the work drew upon many of our common reserves of sonic recognition, mingling the folk memory of the nursery rhyme, the background roar of traffic and the private sounds we make, secure in the knowledge that no one else is listening.
He never did receive the pizza.