To Be an Artist: A Tribute

This site specific installation was exhibited at the Berman Museum, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA, from June to September, 2004. It was commissioned by Philadelphia Tri State Artists Equity and served as the entrance to the55th Anniversary Artists Equity exhibition. The visual componets of the installation were made of unsuccessful pieces of art, donated by Artists Equity members. For the audio component, I intervewed members of Artists Equity about what it is like for each to be an artist.  Exerpts from these digitally recorded interviews were loaded into samplers.  Viewers, by moving through the installation at the entrance to the gallery, triggered sensors that, by means of the two computer systems, played a randomly selected sample of  theses exerpts.

Technically, this work was based on the same general system that I have used in other installations. The computers use a program, written by me in Basic, with assembly language subroutines.  It runs under DOS since a windows environment is unnecessary.  All of the equipment, wiring, and sensors were hidden from view inside the columns on either side of the entrance.  For each of the two computer systems there were two movement sensors connected to an analogue-to-digital converter as the input to the computer. The separate program for each system responds to changes in the sensors to which it was connected, by switching to various subroutines.  These subroutines sent MIDI signals through the MIDI port on the computer, to a sampler.  The outputs of these two samplers were then mixed, amplified and sent to one speaker.