Last fall, artist Nate Page pulled the windowed facade of the Echo Park gallery Machine Project back 25 feet into the space, creating a temporary "sidewalk alcove" he called Storefront Plaza. Which turns out to be the perfect place to rig up motion detectors and transform the crawling movements of free-range babies into experimental music on the fly.
FAQThe free performance or whatever it ends up as runs from 11AM - 4PM, with borrowed babies crawling in shifts. Bootleg flashmob, please.What?
After our friend Sally brought her baby Otto to play Nate Page's Storefront Plaza we realized that we had a perfect baby vivarium on our hands, and if we were going to invite a bunch of babies to crawl around for an afternoon, why not put them to work as variables in a algorithmic sound composition?
How does that work?
Scott Cazan has written some software for the occasion that uses a camera and a computer to track the movement of the babies and convert that information into different sounds.
How will that sound?
Who knows, we've done this before. It could sound terrible, not work, be boring, embarrass everyone and end in tears - like most everything at Machine Project.
Infantcore, Feb. 18 at Machine Project [machineproject via eyeteeth]
