Cattails

During class today, I became intrigued by the thought of creating a cattail installation after Spencer, Becca, and Camille presented some of their ideas (one of which was the aforementioned reedy plant). I then spoke to Camille a bit more about her idea and she mentioned a sculpture in the UM Hospital that resembles a collection of cattails, and although it is noted that you are prohibited from touching the installation, if you interact with it and get the heads of the cattails to strike each other, they create a beautiful gong-like sound.

We were then playing around with incorporating pollution elements into this installation, and we ended up designing a wheeled structure that features multiple stalks with some trash item (like a beer bottle/can) as the head of each "cattail" - perhaps the sound of this installation has to do with the items scraping against each other or putting pressure on each other. We also considered some sort of visual element, like LEDs running up and down the stalks of the cattails. Below is a quick-and-dirty sketch of our idea.

We were a bit stumped beyond this idea, so when I got home following class I decided to look up some installations centered around cattails on Youtube. Amongst the many, many videos of people discussing how to grow, kill, and even make stew out of cattails (???), I managed to find a collection of various :40-1:00 long videos of cattail-oriented installations, most of which featured little explanation. Nonetheless, one aspect of each video I found inspired me in some way.

The first video is about an installation featured in Coachella 2013. This is by far the most explanatory video I found. Essentially, the installation is a forest of many tall stalk-like pillars with colored orbs of light bulbing from the tops of the stalks. These lights change color based on information scanned from the wristbands of the people walking around the installation. It's pretty neat, and I liked how they incorporated audience interaction into the installation in a subtle, passive way that was very aesthetically pleasing. Check it out.

The second video is the funniest one to me, because it is essentially a guy hitting 64 vertically-oriented steel rods with sticks, and he doesn't really sugarcoat that fact. The frequencies produced from the striking didn't really interest me that much or feel unique - I only liked this installation because I was interested in how he engaged with the structure (hitting it with sticks). Camille had also mentioned perhaps the ability to take the cattails from the structure and strike other things (an A Little Mermaid-inspired idea), which I also thought was really interesting. As we think more and more about audience participation this gives me some ideas. Check it out.

I have little to no idea what the final video I found is about. All I know is that this installation is called the Bulrush Project, that is was created by Andrew Von Schie, and that it was exhibited in early August of 2012. Von Schie posted 5 or 6 :40 second long videos about the installation that don't really explain what it is about. I think the lights on the end of the stalks are triggered by the water in some way, or perhaps they are light sensors, as during the day they are not lit. Either way, I thought it might be cool to have our installation engage with water in some way by incorporating water sensors, and this video gave me that idea. Check it out.

(lil bonus item: one of my biggest inspirations, an electroacoustic folk musician named Cosmo Sheldrake, recently did a commissioned performance in a museum where he sampled some of Bernie Krause's work and made electro-folk music out of it. check it out here if you would like.)