Sound as a by-product. Eat me.
‘Sound as a by-product. Eat me’ is a research for participatory sound installation where sonic

textures of packed food consumption will be intertwined with a concept of ‘industrial lunch

concert’. It is an attempt to created a non-scored performative sound environment which

allows a different haptic contact between the audience and the piece to happen.

About the project:
During the residency period in QO2 I am planning to work on a theoretical and material

research into the theme of “lunch concert”, largely known as a moment when an institution

opens its doors for a public musical performance during the lunch time with free admission

and no reservation policy. If you’ve ever found yourself in the Netherlands, outdoors or inside

a cinema or concert venue, in a not-so-formal setting around 12:00 or 12:30 you might have

been treated with tupperware popping noises, rustle of brown paper and aluminium foil

chirring. It always fascinated me: the combination of students’ musical improvisation,

orchestra rehearsal or film soundtrack with those discrete food consumption noises which

have an ability to spread through the public like circles on water.

In the project “Sound as a by-product. Eat me” I am looking into the sonic texture of food

consumption outside of a dining / restaurant setting. I want to explore participatory aspects of

eating typical packed lunch goods: biting on an apple, unwrapping cheese sandwiches,

crumbling plastic and aluminium foils from cereal bars. Instead of muting the public, I am

intrigued by idea of creating a live mix of those participatory interventions and ”basso

continuo” of pre-recorded spatial sound composition.
This is a new direction to explore for me as an artist working with public participation and

often employing physical modes of contact between sound elements, myself and the

participants (like in the performative installations ‘The Ear is a Muscle’ or ‘Take Me, Bring

Me’). The current situation of touch and physical proximity stigmatisation suspends the

familiar techniques of creating a kinetic, haptic and largely physical experience for the public

within the audio installation setup. If I desire to create work in public art and live performance

context I need to look into alternative modes of enabling multi-sensorial experiences.

Three years ago I did field recordings in a reformed church in Amsterdam which was being

transformed into a contemporary hotel. Pneumatic engines driving metal poles into the

underground belly of the church, the hiss of welding works, staccato of chisel hammers

working against the old tiles. My ears caught this concert while I was passing it by on a bike. I

have expressed my excitement to the workers when they had a short lunch break and

eventually managed to get a permission for the audio recordings. This was my starting point.

Since that time I dreamt of working with a setting of an industrial lunch concert. I acquired

several construction helmets for public, I experimented with placing small exciters into those

helmets, I imagined wrapped cheese sandwhiches and tiny waffles packages offered to the

public together with the helmets. Now I also would like to see if I can bring in the microphones

and create a non-directed choreography of eating movements and a non-scored framework

for sonic interventions. I would like to experiment with these elements in QO2 during the

residency period in July 2020. This project doesn’t require a final public presentation. But the

research will be carried on via sessions of one-on-one interaction with participants during the

course of the residency.