Sound Mirrors - Disinformation "Blackout"

This sequence features brief extracts from "Blackout (The Antiphony Video Supplement)" video by Disinformation - Barry Hale's highly influential (and frequently copied) film of concrete parabolic air-defence Sound Mirrors, built at various sites on the UK coast before WW2. "Blackout" was conceived as supplementary to Sound Mirror images by photographer Julian Hills (taken in January 1996) which appear on the sleeve of the Disinformation "Antiphony" double remix CD, published by the record company Ash International in 1997 [1] [2].

Barry Hale's Sound Mirror video has been shown at NTT ICC (Tokyo), The Royal College of Art (London), Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst (Leipzig), The Art House (London), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), The Dom (Moscow), and exhibited at The ICA (London), CCCB (Barcelona), The Mac (Birmingham), Now 1999 (Nottingham), Waygood Gallery (Newcastle), Quay Arts (Isle of Wight), Wrexham Arts Centre, South Hill Park (Bracknell), Saltburn Artists Projects, Q Gallery (Derby), Study Gallery of Modern Art (Poole), Event Gallery (London), Ginza Art Lab (Tokyo) and The Latvian National Museum of Art.

This video is virtually identical to later films by Tacita Dean and Lise Autogena, etc [3], and if there is any confusion about the similarity between the original Sound Mirrors film and Tacita Dean's (much later) film "Sound Mirrors", readers should refer to art historian and curator Anda Rottenberg's letter to Art Monthly [4] about the similarity between artist Katarzyna Kozyra's film "Bath House" - of people chatting in a bath house in Budapest, and Tacita Dean's (much later) film "Gellert" - also of people chatting in a bath house in Budapest! What's most surprising is the fact that Tacita Dean's "Sound Mirrors" was commissioned (by The Public Art Development Trust) AFTER these "methods" had already been exposed in the art press.

Documentation of the Disinformation project appears in The Wire magazine in 1997; in "100% Pylon" by Angus Carlyle, pp. 68-83, "Themepark" 2, 2000; in The Hayward Gallery "Sonic Boom" catalogue, pp. 26-29, 2000; the "Sound Art - Sound as Media" catalogue, pp. 70-73, NTT ICC Tokyo 2000; "The Analysis of Beauty" catalogue 2003; the "Waves" catalogue, pp. 48-49, Latvian National Museum of Art 2006, etc. The "Antiphony Architectural Supplement" appears in Sound Projector 6, pp. 57-64, 1999 - http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/003/articles/jbanks2/index.php

The long version of this film runs just short of 20 minutes, and (even in 2008) remains one of the most comprehensive visual surveys of these extraordinary structures ever conducted. One element notable by its absence from this edit is the long (and beautiful) abstract sequence which Barry created for the full version of this film.

[1] http://www.discogs.com/release/117617
[2] http://rixc.lv/waves/en/txt08.html
[3] The chronology of these projects is documented in "Listening for the Enemy" by Brian Dillon "Cabinet" 12, pp. 68-71, New York 2003
[4] Art Monthly, Oct 1998, page 14

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[ThelemicLaboratory]

93

this is rad

93 93/93

[pontepolentepontepi]

!!!

[32stardust]

like it

[wonderfulfuckyou]

Excellent! I hope you continue the work, it seems to be in an experimental phase although it's ambience is still resonating.

[BobForehead]

they should have done a little research into the critical resonant harmonics of zeppelins, i guess.

[C4eye]

The army did experiment with exploding charges inside the mirrors with a view to concentrating explosive shock waves (nb: this idea is not a "sound" cannon as such) but it didn't work

[BobForehead]

can any of them be used as sound cannons? the more acute ones look like mere shotgun-mic type parabolas, but perhaps with a little glaze and a good horn...

[carolinesimone]

how much do i like your work then... inspiring THANK YOU

[SaraMUSt]

O_o

[C4eye]

No, it's not "fake", but it's not a location recording either (it's a collage of human voice, violin, and electric guitar loops that shift against each other in a very long cyclic rotations). One thing that some people found hard to accept was that that sound mirrors themselves are no more acoustically exciting than any other concrete wall, people had built it up in their minds that they must somehow generate interesting sound, which they don't, any more than any other form of microphone