The satisfying crunch of crushing some crap has never been more enjoyable. Dmitry Morozov, working under his ::vtol:: alias, was commissioned to make an installation for Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow recently and what he devised allowed visitors to come in, enjoy a little destruction and come away with a keepsake of creation.
The basics of the project consisted of a room containing five hydraulic presses with microphones installed. Anyone who came to check it out was allowed to crush their personal belongings in a press and within minutes a generative music program would turn the smashing sounds into a 20-minute work of sound art. A CD would automatically burn and the participant would receive the instant gratification of having rid themselves of a needless item while gaining a one of kind object.
In the artist’s own words:
The project is intended to provoke visitors into spontaneously ridding themselves of material consumer objects for the sake of creating their own individual work of art via deprivation, divestment and destruction. Sound has been taken as the chief medium here with good reason, since sound art is perhaps the least material and most abstract of all genres in art.
Using Pure Data, Max/MSP and AppleScript softwares, ::vtol:: set parameters for how the sound would be processed but every piece is unique because nothing would break on the 10-ton hydraulic presses in exactly the same way. When all was said and done, 1574 original recordings were distributed. You can hear one of them below, but the real joy in this project is the smashing, so definitely watch the video above.
(Image: ::vtol::)
