Washington House Residency: week 2

I’m just finishing up my second week here at the James Washington House and I’m in the midst of prototyping some of my project ideas out in the studio.  There are rooms upon rooms filled with tools, many for stone work, as well as wood working, printing and general making related tasks.  One of the side products of one of the stone drills are these core shapes.  Apparently there were buckets of these cores that Mr. Washington had drilled out of stone, but no one is exactly sure where the stones they came from are.  Certainly a few pieces had cores drilled out for mounting, but given the quantity of cores, they expected more.  So it’s a little bit of a mystery here at the Foundation.

That said, some of the cores also come from previous resident Romson Regarde Bustillo, who drilled holes in stones from the garden and placed them in water in the greenhouse for a haunting examination of negative space.  These stones were then re-purposed by last month’s resident Nikolus Meisel in his piece And then the bush said...

Because stone is such a primary material to Mr. Washington’s work and legacy I wanted to include it as a mechanism for interactive digital experience; to be touched and moved by the audience. 

Another project involves using one of the many Edison voicewriters that Mr. Washington had collected over the years.  These machines are a marvel of engineering and yet at the same time a wildly inefficient way to gather just a little bit of very low quality of sound.  The physicality of these machines, and the wax cylinders they used, stands in stark contrast to the almost ephemeral nature of digital audio we take for granted today.  For this piece I’ll be recording onto the cylinders from Mr. Washington’s archive, with special attention to his own “three star” annotation method and then digitally processing the audio in SuperCollider.