Tweety Pie – full sound and video

sound art May 3, 2020

Here is the full 6-minute Tweety Pie sound piece with video of the Tweety Pie sound sculpture out and about, singing out into the world all through 2019 and early 2020.

OR –  view by Vimeo Link:  Tweety Pie – singing out into the world – 2019 

The sound piece is made from noises recorded around my home and then digitally altered to imitate bird calls, so that – layered up and repeated – they become a type of caricature dawn chorus.

Tweety Pie, the yellow sound sculpture, is made from an old gramophone funnel, a music stand, a bluetooth speaker, and a snuff box – containing a small plastic flamingo with motivational quote – and is operated using an mp3 player that connects to the bluetooth speaker.

I videoed Tweety Pie projecting the sound piece in many different locations, each with their own sound characteristics. You can hear these ambient sounds listening carefully or with headphones, but the Tweety Pie sound recording dominates the audio.

Here is the SoundCloud link to hear the sound-piece alone without video or other ambient sound:

batbleeps · Tweety Pie

I was delighted to have the Tweety Pie sound-piece included in Jez Riley-French’s fascinating sound art zine, Verdure Engraved, showcasing so many fantastic audio artists from all around the world, a great majority of them women:

Why Tweety Pie?

I wanted to crouch down in long grass under leaves, among the gorse, next to a marsh or in the peat below the heather – and listen to the sounds of the wild plants and creatures usually beneath our attention or darting above our eye line. To notice, and to try and hear. 

I wanted to speak peacefully, listen deeply, as someone wise has said.

But I couldn’t leave the house. The house grows full of actions and interactions, the objects and matter hum, and creek. Listening to those instead, I heard imagined birds in chorus – fantastical birds, criss-crossing amplified and elaborated messages to each other, plucking the sound waves with their exuberant calls. 

To sing out into the world, this chorus of everyday unseen actions needs a bold and intrepid bird, equipped to share the beautiful noise. My cheeky Tweeter will project the usually enclosed voices of the inanimate. Tweety Pie, gloriously yellow, is making a stand, singing the song of the furniture and the utensils into the wilderness, serenading the rocks and trees, the rails and aisles and waterways. Will it harmonise or will it jar, resist or be drowned out? Which world will pick up the tune? I send it out there – and wait to find out. 

From the inarticulacy of contradictory feelings, and from all the fears, the doubt, the anger and frustrations – what sounds will emerge? You have to try your voice – and listen deeply. 

This is the signal I want to transmit.

Sheffield – 2019

I need to thank these people for their help and time in facilitating access to some of the locations in this video:

Keith Rowland and Louise Saxon of Breedon Group’s Hope Works, in Hope Valley, Derbyshire; Michael Woodhouse of the British Model Flying Association in Norfolk; the managers and staff of Sainsbury’s Archer Road, Sheffield; the office manager at Abbeydale Golf Club, Sheffield. 

Tweety Pie

sound art September 13, 2018

 

Tweety Pie – this summer’s sound sculpture – has taken flight alone into the world, in the form of a travelog – work in progress… here is a preview.

Take Me To Your Leader – Again!

Uncategorized March 8, 2018

tmtylcamp2

TMTYL II show_view_0947

Manifesto

Alienated People of Earth, enter our Circle of Power: There is a crisis not limited to our shores, it is worldwide and universal. It is cultural, ethical, existential, personal, and political.

We Resist in Many Voices. We defend our Planet.

Whaaaa Whaaaa, drink your fill of the Bitter Cup of Rhetorical Over-indulgence, in our multi-sensory pressure chamber, and let our shamanic outpourings wash over you in a Sound Bath of Aggravated Resistance.

Feel your inner Furie and join your voices to ours … Do you Question our clarity of Vision? Are you with us or against us?

See the rest – a virtual show experience – at yourleaderlovesyou.com 

More photos of this exhibition at Portfolio page

 

Gestures

Uncategorized July 12, 2017
Gestures 3,4,5 - one of the videos made for LoAG
Lexicon of Artists' Gestures - Lea Torp Nielsen's project, April 2017.
See Board, on LoAG. 
[...Click linked titles to view each one...]
The stage is set for doodling around...

IMG_0971 (2)

Studio play

Uncategorized July 12, 2017
Active things, playful gestures, interacting with my stuff,
thinking about the Lexicon, LoAG, 
Lea Torp Nielsen's online archive of artists' gestures.
January 2016


							

Other shows 2015 to 2016

Uncategorized August 9, 2016
Sluice, London, October 2015

Visual Aids I and II  - also shown at bloc projects shop (left)

Bloc Assembly, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, January 2016

Eye hear U bend - Blinking eye video with orange and yellow mane and 
sphinx wheelie stand; craning suspended suction cup in pink, orange and
yellow.
 
Bloc showcase_Maja_0020

Bloc showcase_Maja_0004

Bloc Assembly, Sphinx arc thing combo

Art Sheffield 2016

Uncategorized August 9, 2016

Take Me To Your Leader –

A group show as part of Art Sheffield Festival of contemporary art, 2016, curated by Martin Clark.  I was one of five artists in this show:

TMTYL Poster

When living under Ming the Merciless, finding and defending your own 
planet is no joke.

Negotiating terms in your chosen language risks drastic 
misunderstandings, or slipping into the inept script.

It might mean resorting to the corny or ham-fisted line; or invite the 
alienation of confronting the unfamiliar.

Take me to your Leader subjects you to mild peril and disorientation 
as it plunders worlds within imagined worlds, mines the
astronomical in the everyday, and contemplates paradoxical
objects and post-apocalyptic calamity.


IMG_3334
Made North Gallery, Persistence Works, May 2016.

 

My work in the exhibition was called Game On.

It consisted of two videos, painted mixed media and a savoy cabbage. 
This is the text I wrote for it:

" A games console to delight and frustrate the imagination - in making 
this work I have been thinking about retro sci-fi and computer games, 
war games - power games. The console is a site of creation and 
destruction, power and powerlessness. It can engage and distract. 

Standing at the controls, the decisions are ours - we have the freedom 
to imagine, to play, to take action. Faced with the objects and spaces 
in front of us, including those spaces that open up in the mind, 
you can be the pilot or the passenger. Or the Time Lord. 

But is that freedom as real as it feels? Have we been manipulated? 

Are we collaborators? Perhaps we are willing slaves. Perhaps we are 
aliens on someone else’s planet.

The low tech temporary structures, the tentative experimental things, 
the thoughts that range across form and surface, know that they don’t 
have long to get the message across. They do what they can. 
They resist, they open up, they give clues. 


Take your place at the controls.

Game On."