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Head in a Bell - Exhibition by Scott Myles - GoMA Glasgow

A new exhibition of painting, sculpture, print, moving image and sound by Scott Myles, through which the artist examines ideas of exchange and circulation.

Opening celebration
Head in a Bell will be open from 10am on Saturday 27 July, with an opening celebration from 2 to 4pm: Free, and open to all - drop in

At the heart of the exhibition is Instrument for the People of Glasgow, a social sculpture comprised entirely of donations from Eurorack synthesizer manufacturers from many different countries.

Myles views his action of asking ‘a little, from a lot of people’ as an egalitarian model of economic organisation. His artistic strategy is applicable to other contexts and scenarios, for example politics. In the spirit of this gifting model, Myles has produced a poster detailing all the donations, with printed copies free to take away by visitors. At the close of the show Myles will donate the instrument to Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound (GLOSS), the UK’s first electronic musical instrument library.

The exhibition features a collaboration with artist Oscar Prentice-Middleton. Myles and Prentice-Middleton have attached sensitive geophone microphones, which detect vibrations, to the gallery’s hidden air-exchange system. Wires physically connect the concealed plant room to Instrument for the People of Glasgow in the public gallery, creating a new live sound work that reacts to GoMA’s infrastructure. Head in a Bell invites viewers to consider unseen aspects of our institutions, forms of organisation, companionship and the climate emergency.

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News
Transcript
00:00My name is Scott Miles and I'm an artist.
00:29We're standing in Goma, Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art, in a solo exhibition of mine
00:35entitled Head in a Bell, which opens on Saturday at 2 o'clock.
00:40One of the major pieces in the show is this social sculpture, which is entitled Instrument
00:48for the People of Glasgow, and it consists entirely of donations from modular synthesizer
00:56manufacturers and individuals who I approached.
01:00I went to Berlin in May last year to a synthesizer trade fair and handed out letters asking,
01:06I had this idea, to ask a lot of people for a small thing, i.e. would they donate one
01:13or two modules, these Eurorack format synthesizer modules, to populate and create an instrument.
01:21So in all I think there's about 75 donations and I was kind of interested in that as a
01:26model that you could apply to other situations to create art.
01:31The sound aspect of the work is a collaboration with another artist, Oscar Prentice Middleton,
01:36and so we've mic'd up the plant room and we're sending the audio and control voltage signals
01:42through the cabling visibly in the gallery into the synthesizer and that's part of the
01:48sound installation which also comprises an element of the show.
01:51I've made a painting in the back space there which is a kind of rendering of the unseen
01:59plant room in Goma, so it's kind of a picture of a space you can't see.
02:04What's been nice about this show was that they actually invited myself and Sam Ainslie
02:11who had the previous show and Kira Phillips who has the next show, they asked us before
02:15the pandemic to make solo shows here.
02:19So I've had a lot of time to develop the work and I'm showing a piece from 1998 all the
02:25way up to the majority of the work in the show is from now.
02:29There's posters that people can take away because one aspect, a kind of crucial aspect
02:35of the instrument is that it's like the air conditioning, it's kind of flowed to me and
02:42then I've kind of used it to better understand and play with sound and synthesis and then
02:48present it as part of an exhibition, an idea and then at the close of the exhibition in
02:53February next year I'll donate the instrument and it's on the flight case to Glasgow's
02:58synthesizer library, it's called GLOSS, Glasgow Library of Synthesized Sound and it's the
03:03first synth library of its kind in the UK.
03:07So in a sense the work, I guess in that sense it's a social sculpture because it will find
03:13a new situation and in this context it's making a work in conjunction with the plant room
03:22but equally this instrument could be used to make other genres of music.
03:26It's thrilling to present an exhibition in Goma and the fact the show runs for seven
03:31months means that it will potentially be seen by a lot of people and yeah I've been working
03:37on it for a long time and it opens on this Saturday at 2pm so come and see it.
03:42My name's Oscar Apprentice Middleton, I'm a musician and artist based in Glasgow and
03:49I've been working with Scott Miles on this sound piece that's been shown in Goma starting
03:55this Saturday the 27th.
03:57My involvement in what we're doing in the exhibition here has been to use those modules
04:03that have been donated and create a sound for the exhibition.
04:09You can see all of the yellow cables here, those all lead up into the plant room where
04:16the air handling units are for the air vents that are in the space which are bringing air
04:23from outside of the gallery into the gallery and taking the old air from inside the gallery
04:28back out again so just refreshing and cycling the air around the spaces and when we first
04:35came into the space we noticed that sound and we were wondering you know do we try and
04:41make a sound piece that kind of quietens that sound down or obfuscates it, sort of drowns
04:50it out and it just didn't seem to make sense so we wanted to figure out a way that we could
04:55actually begin to use the sound from the plant room and this hidden infrastructure
05:00in the building and allow it to come into the space and draw attention to it.
05:05Going around almost with a stethoscope and listening to different points and trying to
05:10find something that illuminated parts of it that were both surprising but also didn't
05:14lose that cycling of the sound.
05:16About 60% of it or so sounds that are directly from the live feed from upstairs and then
05:25that signal is split out into various modules and filtered in different ways to make it
05:30slightly more harmonic or to make it almost more like a pitch or like an instrument like
05:36a bowed string or like the sound of a bell but it all originates from that noisy infrastructure
05:45within the building that's hidden away.
05:47Is it a loop or is everything live so it will all be fresh?
05:52Everything's live, the sounds that are coming from the plant room the microphones are statically
05:57placed on those and there's like there's a texture and a timbre to those sounds which
06:04isn't changing but the subtle vibrations that are coming from the plant room and say if
06:10one of the plant room technicians is upstairs and opening and shutting doors that will
06:16affect what's happening in here as well.

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