Babble is a performance created by Paul Litherland, and developed by Litherland and percussionist Alexander MacSween. They perform a series of verses on electronic drum kits connected to computer equipment.
For thousands of years, people, separated by many kilometers, communicated with each other through drumbeats. Loud, soft, with pitch bends and with timing, drums would send messages about travellers, invaders or celebrations. Today, separated by even greater distances, we are still sending messages with a percussion instrument: The computer keyboard.
As the performers play their electronic drums, the hits were converted to MIDI signals and sent to the computers, which in turn interpreted and transformed the signals. The performance was presented in five scenes. In three of these, each hit generated a 0 or a 1: in “Binary Buildup” the 0s and 1s were displayed directly on the screen; in “ASCII Writer” the performers used them to carefully build the ascii codes to display the letters of two texts: “I made a machine to speak for me” and “I want to speak for myself”; in “Binary Meltdown” Litherland and MacSween drum frenetically, which the computer displayed as a series of random characters. In two of the works, different ways of hitting the pads controlled a series of video clips: in “Stutter” this played video clips backwards and forwards of the performers’ mouths saying words; in “Sign Language” it played clips of deaf performers signing letters and words.
Babble explores the codes of various languages, the technologies of communication, and how these technologies transform our messages and often fail us in our attempts to relate to each other. Babble builds a bridge between old technologies and new ones. It is a multimedia perfomance about speaking and trying to send messages. It is about the need to be heard and understood.
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- Exhibition history
- moismulti
- ( show)
- February 22, 2001
- Meduse, Quebec City
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- Other artist(s): Alexander MacSween, Jean-Philippe Thibault
- Babble
- ( show)
- 22-24 mars 2001
- Galerie B-312, 372 Ste-Catherine, suite 312
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- En cette époque d'« hypercommunication » ne pas être en contact est une aberration, voire une impossibilité! Cependant, ce type de communication implique une perte de matérialité. Nous en sommes presque réduits à être des transmetteurs de messages et notre présence physique devient presque accessoire, voire même gênante. Dans la performance intitulée 01, le flot numérique est ralenti et rendu visible. L'artiste Paul Litherland et le musicien Alexander MacSween sont installés à leurs batteries équipées de contacts électroniques et envoient des messages à un ordinateur. Utilisant les rythmes des percussions convertis en code binaire, les batteurs peuvent choisir d'épelers des mots, de créer des textes à partir de listes de mots prédéterminés et de les relier à des images projetées sur deux écrans, un pour chaque performeur. Paul Litherland poursuit ses préoccupations qui l'amènent à questionner et comprendre ce besoin primaire de l'homme, besoin qui nous habite toute notre vie durant, celui d'être entendu, d'être compris. Les moyens techniques que nous avons élaborés produisent et diffusent une quantité phénoménale de messages, mais cette prolifération finit par assourdir l’auditeur, le positionnant, à la limite, hors-circuit.
- TranzTech 2001
- ( show)
- October 14, 2001, 5:30 pm
- Steam Whistle Brewery, The Roundhouse,, 255 Bremer Ave., Toronto, Ontario
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- Visual Artist Paul Litherland and musician Alexander MacSween sit down at drum kits equipped with electronic triggers and beat out messages via a computer with a midi connection. Using drum rhythms converted to binary code the drummers can choose to spell out words, control video sequences or create texts from a predetermined list of words. The texts and images are projected onto screens. With Babble, Paul Litherland follows his preoccupation in understanding basic human needs: the need to be heard, the need to be understood.
- Other artist(s): Alexander MacSween
- Curator(s): Charles Street video project, Greg Woodbury
- Production Credits
- On stage computer assistant - Jean-Phillipe Thibault // Financial Assistance: Canada Council // Software design: Avatar - Steeve Lebrasseur, David Michaud, Emile Morin, Jocelyn Robert // Software sponsorship: cycling '74 - www.cycling74.com // Performer / ASL interpreters: Liz Scully, Pamela Witcher, Marjolaine Huard // Production assistance: Mario Bernier, Lucy, Karen Trask, Donald Goodes
- Related documents
- Dayna McLeod, "Drums Go Digital: Seeing the sound of 0s and 1s" (Exhibition Review), Hour Magazine, 22 March, 2001.
- Benoit Arsenault, "Symphonie no. 2 pour imprimantes matricielles au Mois Multi 2001" (extrait de compte-rendu), Impact Campus, 27 février 2001.
- Various press releases, communiqués and descriptions
- Programme pour la performance et l'événement Mois Multi 2001 (avec texte de Claudine Moquin), Recto-verso, Ville de Québec, 2001.
- Program for performance of Babble at Tranz-Tech, Toronto, 2001.
- Programme pour la performance de Babble à la galerie B-312, Montreal, 2001.
- Notes
- Paul Litherland and his collaborator Alexander MacSween were commissioned by multimedia artist and producer Robert Lepage to adapt the midi program they had developed for Babble to trigger video clips for use in the “India” section of the 2002 performance entitled Zulu Time. Zulu Time is a collaborative work between Robert Lepage and Peter Gabriel.
- Component Pages
for this work
Excerpt from performance of Babble 1m 24s- Complete video document of Babble performance at moismulti, Québec (21m:24s)
- Work type:
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Performances
