A Symphony of Floorboards, Pipes and Stairs
(My nightingale floors made it into the title! Whoo!)

“You’re going to have a house, and the house makes music. When you get here, you’ll figure it out.”

That is more or less accurate, as far as it goes, though it clearly falls short as a practical description. “The Music Box,” the project of which this tower is a part, is one of those things that requires a hyphen or a compound word to describe; Delaney Martin, its curator, calls it “a shantytown-sound laboratory.”

In more literal terms, it is a collection of tumbledown wooden and metal structures built on the site, and almost entirely from the remains of a late-18th-century Creole cottage that collapsed a couple of years ago here in the historic, bohemian Bywater neighborhood.

Each structure houses an instrument, or two or three. In some cases the structures are musical instruments themselves. There is the thatched-roof hut that is home to an elaborate arrangement of Balinese vibraphones, the shack with amplified floorboards, the rusty spiral staircase that is also a foot-operated pipe organ and the little glass house containing what looks like a giant, bell-lined hoop skirt. They are all clustered together on the narrow lot, like the stage set of a fairy tale that takes place in a junkyard.

Be sure to check out the slide show.

There’s also a brief video about the first performance. (You can hear my floorboards starting at 1:22 or so)

Vegevision!
We owe that awesome headline to Brooklyn artist Ranjit Bhatnagar, who sometimes uses the term for his flatbed scanner images of Greenmarket produce, a project he’s been working on since 2000. His carrots graced the cover of Edible Brooklyn’s Spring 2007 issue, and selections from his scans–lovely little sprays of garlic chives, slices of okra that look like stars, and of course, bacon–are being shown through the month of December at the Baby Grand (world’s smallest) karaoke bar in a show called Greenmarket Scanography. For those who’ve been to this tiny Soho spot on Lafayette St., you know the key component of that name is Baby: This is but a sliver of a space, and thus Bhatnagar’s work, like others previewed at the bar, is being shown in slide format. Literally–the slides, shown below, are displayed on the wall, lit from behind, and viewed using the provided magnifying glass. Oh yeah, should you miss the show, you can see some of his recent work on Flickr, too.

The project continues, with 263 fresh & all-organic images so far.

screenshot from clickblog.it

Thanks, boingers!

“There’s already a lot of crap music in the world and it hasn’t killed us.”

More at wired.com, 9/27/07.

There’s no attempt to create a humanoid with Misericordiam, by Ranjit Bhatnagar, an accordion hung from a rope. It compresses and, thanks to gravity, decompresses with a convulsive abandon. I don’t know if it had any other purpose than humor, but I didn’t feel like I needed more.

– roberta fallon and libby rosof’s artblog: The human side of artbots

MONUMENTAL MOMENT
A playful approach to Tatlin’s Monument

When I heard the title of Flux Factory’s latest show, Response to Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International Conceived in the Mood of Ambivalence, or R.T.T.M.T.T.T.I.C.I.T.M.O.A. for short, I thought I was going off to see a ridiculous, pretentious show full of highfalutin communist propaganda.

I’m happy to report that I was completely wrong. [...]

– Aileen Torres, New York Press

My photo (above) from opening night was used to illustrate the article.

[...] The exterior appearance was plain– a sleek, seamless black wall that nearly spanned the entire lofty space. A silver crank handle and a small, clear, rectangular box encasing a pickle were the only ornaments. Clamped by wires on both sides, the pickle began to spark and light up as the handle was turned. Moments later, a halt­ing melody churned out from the other side of the wall.

A journey through the maze-like interior of the melody’s physical architecture began when you infil­trated the entrances to the box, tucked away on either side. The artists created a series of small musical chambers connected by sharp turns, stairs, and an orange slide, producing curious tex­tures of sound that played in sync, united in a single song. An old accordion hummed in a blue velvet room designed by Ranjit Bhatnagar. Draped with delicate strings of tiny white lights, it hung by a rope and pulley from the ceiling like a chan­delier, playing itself with each rota­tion. [...]

– pp74-75, Sculpture 12/2006, International Sculpture Center

The sound of an accordion can be joyful or annoying, and artist Ranjit Bhatnagar has managed to add a dose of creepiness with his creation “Misericordiam.” Here, an accordion dangles in a black curtain-flanked booth, playing sinister sounds to no one in particular. White LEDs give it a festive air, but its intermittent noises and shakes make it seem like a prop escaped from a haunted house.

– Rachel Metz, Wired Blogs

The FluxBox, which was on view at the Flux Factory in Queens from March 25 to April 29, triggered a greater feeling of suspense than your everyday automata. Not because it was a room-sized version of something that usually fits in your hand, but because the only visible part of the box from the entrance was the crank, and the crank was wired to a kosher pickle. more…
- Bethany Ryker

Music boxes are typically small, delicate items, but imagine creating one large enough to walk through. The Flux Factory, a Queens-based nonprofit exhibition space and artists collective/habitat, has done just that with its latest installation, FluxBox. Instead of a standard “tooth and comb” apparatus, however, seven acoustic sculptures produce the show’s simple 16-bar melody. more…

Most entries fell into the category that Mr. Galanter called ”punk-rock robotics,” emphasizing cheap components and a playful do-it-yourself approach.

Ranjit Bhatnagar said he had torn apart his stereo speakers to build Sketching Device No. 1, which used patterns of vibration to move pens across a sheet of paper. David Webber’s AO2000, which visitors picked as their favorite, made chaotic music with a blender, an adding machine, two laptop computers, an old television and some coffee cans, among other things. Symet Studio, by Stefan Prosky, a family of simple solar-powered robots that left trails of dots as they hopped around, was voted best of show by the robot-builders.