Big Trombone
media
posted on 2024-11-18, 23:21 authored by Peter ThiedekePeter Thiedeke, John FergusonJohn Ferguson, Christopher StoverChristopher StoverBig Trombone was an urban media art installation at the Big City Lights Festival, 2024. This experimental multi-channel projected image and spatial soundscape was a hybrid form of urban acupuncture, a civic hack in public space that aimed to supplant the humdrum of everyday urban existence. Big Trombone’s immense disfigured imagery and reverberating rhythms emanated from Regent Lane, spilling into Southport, a Central Business District of The City of Gold Coast, to create new energy and demonstrate the possibilities of what might otherwise be missing.
History
ERA Category
- Recorded/Rendered Creative Work - Film/Video
Funding type
- Public funds
Eligible major research output?
- Yes
If not major research
- Major Research
Research Statement
Background Big Trombone is an urban media art installation that used projected imagery and generative audio to critique the top-down transformation of the public sphere mediated by technologists, urban planners, and the private sector corporate agenda (Habermas 1992). This research is situated within the discourse surrounding media art as interrogator of sociotechnical urban change in the so-called smart city (Ag et al. 2016) and civic hacking as resistance to the commodification of the public sphere (de Waal and de Lange 2019). Contribution Big Trombone rejected standardised models of aestheticism associated with public art commissioned by city officials, usually centred on visual spectacle for economic value. Instead, its distorted soundscape and immersive 300-square-metre visual field enhanced the cultural value of its public reception site and the local community's well-being through a unique form of urban acupuncture. Big Trombone provided citizens with cathartic relief from the logical flows of city life by interrupting the pragmatic and mundane nature of day-to-day life in the urban environment with an irrational urban experience. Significance Big Trombone was selected by Rosie Dennis, the Artistic Director of Placemakers Gold Coast, for the Big City Lights Festival. It was exhibited in the Southport CBD from June 21 to July 7, 2024. The festival, attended by more than 15,000 people, was presented by Experience Gold Coast, The City of Gold Coast, and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Treaty, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, Communities and the Arts.Publisher
Big City Lights FestivalPlace of publication
Gold Coast, AustraliaConfidential / Culturally sensitive
- No
Copyright notes
© Peter Thiedeke, John Ferguson, Christopher StoverReferences
Ag, Tanya Ravn, Susa Pop, Nerea Calvillo, and Mark Wright. 2016. What Urban Media Art Can Do, Why When Where & How. av edition. de Waal, Martijn and de Lange, Michiel. 2019. "Introduction—The Hacker, the City and TheirInstitutions: From Grassroots Urbanism to Systemic Change.” In The Hackable City, edited by de Lange, Michiel, and Martijn de Waal, 1-17. Vol. Book, Whole. Singapore:Springer. Habermas, Jürgen, Thomas Burger, Frederick Lawrence, and Ebscohost. 1992. The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Vol. Book, Whole. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Medium
Multi-channel outdoor projection mapped video and spatial soundscapeSize of work
30 metres w x 10 metres highNumber of discrete components
1Length of recording
10:40Date of recording
June 2024Duration of performance
The work played as 00:10:40 loop over four hours per night (Friday, Saturdays and Sundays) for three weeks.Estimated size of audience
15,000Authors of work performed
Peter Thiedeke, John Ferguson, Chris StoverExhibition date from
2024-06-21Exhibition date to
2024-07-07Was the work disseminated?
- Yes
Form of dissemination
- Public performance
Scope of dissemination
- State
Did the work go on tour?
- No