CREATIVES

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A Dish: Au Clair de la Lune — For Édouard-Léon Scott and László Moholy-Nagy— (1860 / 1923 / 2014-19)

“I have suggested to change the gramophone from a reproductive instrument to a productive one, so that on a record without prior acoustic information, the acoustic information, the acoustic phenomenon itself originates by engraving the necessary Ritchriftreihen (etched grooves).” [1]

In 1923, Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy made the above proposal to produce a record without inputting acoustic information. At the time, it was simply a provocative idea. Nine decades later, the idea of “a record without prior acoustic information” can be realized on several materials, including paper, wood, and lacquer plates, owing to mature vinyl audio recording technology and current personal fabrication tools [2][3]

This time, in cooperation with a potter, we chose porcelain as the material. We realized the informatization of the sound to be preserved for thousands of years guaranteed by history.

In this work, we took the motif from “Au Clair de la Lune,” a French folk song recorded by French inventor Leon Scott in 1860, and one of the oldest recording of our history (at this stage). We calculated the frequency of each note from the score, draw the corresponding waveform with Adobe Illustrator, and cut the graphics as a horizontal groove on the surface of the material (i.e., unglazed pottery plate). Then, we grazed and fired the plate to play on a record player.

[1] László Moholy-Nagy. (1923/1989) New Plasticism in Music. Possibilities of the Gramophone. In Broken Music: Artists’ Recordworks, Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier (Eds.). Berliner Kunstlerprogramm des Daad and gelbe Musik, Berlin, Germany, 53-58.
[2] Jo, K. (2014) The Role of Mechanical Reproduction in (What Was Formerly Known as) the Record in the Age of Personal Fabrication, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol.24, pp.65-67, MIT press.
[3] Jo, K.(2018) Au Clair de La Lune on Gramophone "For Édouard-Léon Scott and László Moholy-Nagy" (1860/1923/2015). Proc. of the Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. ACM, New York, 2018, 517–520.

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