Dinner Music

Spent a weekend this month on a farm in Youngsville, NC with a crew of 20 or so other artists, audio engineers, filmmakers and friends working on a shoot for David Colagiovanni and Melissa Haviland's project called (for now, at least) Dinner Music. The work builds on Music for New Mexico (excerpts below) and their mutual interests in breaking things and, of course, fine china. 

In Youngsville, the artists constructed a 25-ish-foot scaffold from which they'd drop entire table settings of china onto a dinner table (the photo above shows the crew prepping for a preliminary test using tuning forks). The crew dropped six or seven complete settings over two days. Following each round we picked up every shard — the artists' intent is to reassemble as many plates, cups, saucers, shakers, teapots and serving dishes as possible for exhibition. A daunting task; many pieces, naturally, were obliterated.

Each drop was recorded on a RED camera at 100 fps; the audio meticulously captured by David McConnell (above, both Davids). The finished work will mine the explosions for every visual and aural detail, turning split-second shatters inside out. David C. says the show (location and schedule TBD) will have a number of outputs: video, object, photograph and screenprint.

Colagiovanni and Haviland's earlier explorations in Music for New Mexico are exceptionally beautiful. I'm really into such technologically-afforded manipulations of experience, especially as sound pieces. What's in a moment, and what might we apprehend if our consciousnesses were shaped differently? Dinner Music will be an even richer and more expansive exploration of occurrences at the edge of perception; surreality in effect. 

a couple other benefits of farm-time: