portfolio A selection of Philip van Allen's projects
Corporate Delicti
Corporate Delicti was a group exhibition at Nucleus Gallery around the topic of disillusionment with corporate life. Collaborating with student Colin Owen, we built a system of interactive objects from an office – a copier, file cabinet, and fax machine. Painted gray, each object was made interactive by removing the guts and putting sensors and speakers inside.
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Video of project after the break
The copier groaned when someone approached it, and when the “copy” button was pushed, a loop of copying sound played. With each subsequent push, a music track was added to the mix, building up a complete musical loop.
The file cabinet played more music tracks that synchronized with the copier sound. This track faded up as the user opened the drawer, bringing in more tracks the further the drawer was opened (typing, drums, etc.), In addition, occasionally when the drawer was opened, the sound of crows seemed to jump out of the cabinet and fly across the gallery space as the sound moved from a speaker inside the cabinet to speakers above it, and the across the room to speakers in the back of the gallery.
The fax machine played a loud and ominous sound when the handset was picked up. When the flash-hook on the phone was clicked, the fax machine played a computer voice reading a random segment of a contract stating the company owned everything created, throughout the universe. These contract excerpts used different computer voices and came out of different speakers each time they played.
10 minute documentation video -Â 1st section at gallery opening, 2nd section staged demo, 3rd section walkthrough of entire show
