Electronic Symphony to Tackle London Air Pollution
in clean air we fly, a sound installation by Kaffe Matthews
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The first Invisible Dust enquiry by artists and scientists into air pollution, health and climate change
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Sunday 6th December – 12.00 noon-9pm
One day open air CYCLE POWERED audio installation in: Gillett Square, Dalston, London E8
6-9 pm -Press Drinks Reception at the: Ochre Works Cafe, Gillett Square
7th-11th December- Installation continues at The Vortex Jazz Club 12.00-6pm
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Sound artist Kaffe Matthews has made a new eight channel audio work inviting the audience to reflect on her ‘clean air paths’ playing through the polluted London air.
The movement of air in these ‘paths’, caused by the vibrations of music sent from eight speakers projecting across the square will slice through the polluted London atmosphere from 12 noon to 9pm on Sunday 6th December. The speakers will be mounted around Gillett Square’s large public space in East London, an inner city area in close proximity to a heavily polluting major London trunk road.
The work plays with the analogy between sound and invisible airborne pollution. Although we are immersed in both, by its very nature pollution always degrades an environment, but sound has the ability to enhance and transform space.
Kaffe Matthews, a world-renowned sound artist, has worked locally with school children together gathering sound recordings, inventing carbon free transport solutions and logging air pollution statistics to filter and process the material of a new music composition. This experiment has produced music with no beginning and no end, the resultant multi-layered work a shimmering symphony of melodic lines and clusters of voice and tone that will collide in ever changing combinations, altering the vibrations of Gillett Square’s air in pools as it plays.
Staged on the weekend before the UN Climate change conference in Copenhagen, In clean air we fly seeks to re-engage people in the issues around UK air pollution. Central to Matthews’s current work are her environmental concerns, and so the installation will only play if visitors to the event cycle its bicycle powered, Magnificent Revolution, audio system.
BACKGROUND
- in clean air we fly is commissioned by Invisible Dust and produced by Hackney Cooperative Developments Gillett Square project. It is the inaugural event for Invisible Dust, an organisation set up by curator Alice Sharp and supported through a research grant from the Wellcome Trust to involve artists and scientists in highlighting air pollution, effects on health and climate change. Atmospheric Chemist, Professor Peter Brimblecombe, from University of East Anglia, who measures air pollution through measuring the components of dust, has inspired the Invisible Dust project and as part of working with Matthews he made presentations in the two Dalston schools.
- The power is provided through bicycles for the in clean air we fly event on Sunday 6 December which are provided by Magnificent Revolution. The work continues indoors at the Vortex, London’s world-renowned jazz club at the end of Gillett Square from 12-6pm each day 7th-11th December.
- To make in clean air we fly, Matthews collaborated with 40 children from Shacklewell and Colvestone primary schools in Dalston to explore the possibilities of city transport without pollution and its related health and environmental effects. Together they investigated the local streets, identifying the air pollution hotspots and mapping the results at both street and sky levels to build a musical score from the local airspace. The children recorded neighbourhood street sounds, played instruments and wrote songs also exploring the tones of the ancient Solfeggio series which Matthews has combined to create one shifting multilayered audio work.
- This project seeks to highlight the urgent need for people to reduce their car use. Manmade air pollution has many effects on health as well as contributing to climate change. It aggravates Asthma, currently 5.4 million people in the UK are currently receiving treatment for asthma, of these 1.1 million are children (1 in 11) and 42% of people with asthma say that traffic fumes stop them walking and shopping in congested areas (Asthma UK website)
- Gillett Square in Dalston was the first urban square to be completed in the ‘100 Public Spaces’ for London Initiative. Since 2006 a cultural programme has explored how the square can function as an inclusive public arts venue. This work is led by Hackney Co-operative Developments in collaboration with a range of local partners. Gillett Square Art Commissions 2009 includes Mezzo Moderno, Mezzo Distrutto 11th – 14th November 2009 that is a large scale Video installation by artist Larisa Blazic who has worked with local community groups to present their images of local regeneration.
KAFFE MATTHEWS BIOG
Kaffe Matthews has been making and performing new music via all kinds of digital gadgetry internationally for fifteen years. She is now most known for her live sampling performances of events and places in real time and the collective project “music for bodies” which makes sonic furniture and music to feel rather than just listen to. Recent works include The Marvelo Project,(2008), a Folkestone Triennial commission, which enabled visitors to cycle their own path through the work from specially made GPS linked stereo bicycles, and Fathers (2009), an audiovisual opera with the Lappetites, just premiered HKW, Berlin.
Currently she is working with the Gluts to make the musical performance Café Carbon for the Copenhagen climate summit, and Symphony Hammerhead, an ambitious collaboration with shark scientists to make an audio visual work for 2011, after a recent Gulbenkian Galapagos Islands residency. Her 2004 collaboration Weightless Animals was awarded a BAFTA, she received a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship in 2005 and an Award of Distinction, Prix Ars Electronica 2006 for the work Sonic Bed London. In 2006 she was made an Honorary Professor of Music, Shanghai Music Conservatory and in 2009 a patron of the Galapagos Conservation Trust shark project. Her stereo solo works are available through: www.annetteworks.com
LOCAL PARTNERS
Colvestone Primary School, Jenny Staff, A Space, Shacklewell Primary School and is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the National Lottery through Arts Council England and Hackney Council.
WEBSITES
Kaffe Matthews: http://www. kaffematthews.net
http://www. annetteworks.com http://www.musicforbodies.net/
Invisible Dust: http://www.invisibledust.com
The Vortex Jazz Club : http://www.vortexjazz.co.uk
Gillett Square: http://www.gillettsquare.org.uk
TRAVEL TO GILLETT SQUARE
Gillett Squared, Hackney Co-operative Developments, Dalston, London N16.
Dalston Kingsland London Overland Station, Buses: 149, 243, 76,67
