Good Girls Gone Bad

Me and Lilly created an experimental sound piece.  The idea was influenced by Cher and Sonny, Andy Warhol, La Monte Young, and John Cage.  For this project, Lilly and I guided our class to the wellness center and asked people to position themselves on different levels of the stairwell in the building.  We then asked everyone to use their phone to play the link we sent in email.  The piece is about the experience of listening.  Driving influence from La Monte Young's Dream House, a piece about sound that viewers walked through and heard different sounds playing from different locations of the room.

Image of La Monte Young's Dream House

For this piece we were interested in the distortion of the song from not only being in a space with reverb from the concrete walls but also distortion from the layers of everyone playing the song off of their phone at slightly differing times. The sound was dependent on the process of streaming it from youtube.

Some ideas that Lilly and I were thinking about for this piece was its connection to McLuhan's idea of the global village.  The internet is a tool for mass communication amongst people.  The song was a clip we posted on youtube.

"I've Got You, Babe"

The piece was about the interconnectedness between the individual and the global village.  Because we asked everyone to play the song off their phone, a personal item it was an individualized experience.  The location in the stairwell also affected the individual experience.  By asking everyone to stand on different levels and play the song, the piece was a distortion from the interacting layers of sound.  A global village was created in that moment of an understanding or experience to sound that was different for every individual but was completely interdependent on the actions, sounds, and movements of every individual present.

Other things I was thinking about but will explain later is how this piece connects to a "cinema of attraction" defined by Tom Gunning.
-----act of putting something on display and the subject as spectacle.