Looped stereo sound track, 11 minutes, 29 seconds

An ambient sound piece designed to be played very softly in the exhibition space, this was created from a system made by measuring and mapping all the pipes in the front room of the gallery (a small Victoria factory building), their twists and turns and overlaps, connectors, fixings etc. Individual sounds were assigned to each element.  These sounds were all created using similar copper piping, and then some were manipulated digitally to make an interesting multi-layered sound landscape.

Exhibition writing:

“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman…. that form ever follows function”.

Louis Sullivan, architect (1896)

A gallery is commonly used as a functional container for artworks.  In this co-curated and co-created exhibition, Cable Collective instead aimed to explore the form of the space, specifically as expressed in the configuration of the pipes, drawing out the contrast between their stolid utility and perhaps unappreciated beauty.

Pipes endure. They just sit there and get on with their business.  Perhaps they will still be here in 1000 years: A quiet, circulating system with a tinge of immortality in spite of their insistent and earthly materiality.

Metre upon liquid-filled metre mirror human innards, quietly working by design, each fulfilling its ordained duty. Unthanked. Serving the occupants of the building as our veins, arteries, ducts, and tubes autonomously serve us. What could interrupt this seamless industry? Both a heart and a boiler can be broken.

The contours of the pipes, connectors and fixings have been blunted over time with many layers of cosmetic emulsion paint. An  attempt to make them blend in which ironically at once draws attention to them. Formerly crisp shadows are corrupted into blur. Elbow angles and twisting double-backs awkwardly accommodate the contours of the rooms, disrupting rhythm and line. Pragmatic piercing of wall and steel are another unconscious sculptural by-product. Grace and beauty borne by the unseen hand of quotidian necessity.

Cable Collective created film, sound and other interventions in artistic response to the space attempting to playfully draw out the aesthestic paradox so neatly encapsulated by the pipework itself.

@cable.collective