in a landscape...

1930's RPPC from latvia...

this is one of my dream sculptures - a hybrid of unintended associations including stockhausen's sternklang park music, superstudio's continuous moments, and alexander graham bell's pyramid tetrahedral structures... and of course, russolo.

looking at these giant speakers i can't help but hope that this crowd is in the midst of a cloud of futurist sound compositions fueled by the ideas in russolo's art of noises, and composed using sounds from his list of "the 6 families of noises of the futurist orchestra":

1
Rumbles
Roars
Explosions
Crashes
Splashes
Booms
2
Whistles
Hisses
Snorts
3
Whispers
Murmurs
Mumbles
Grumbles
Gurgles
4
Screeches
Creaks
Rumbles
Buzzes
Crackles
Scrapes
5
Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc.
6
Voices of animals and men:
Shouts
Screams
Groans
Shrieks
Howls
Laughs
Weezes
Sobs

when speakers become sculpture...

the cover photo from a 1960 issue of pf reporter and electronic servicing magazine. the rest of the magazine is nothing to speak of, but i really love this cover shot. most of us spend our whole lives looking at audio systems like this from a distance, but this lucky repairman looks like he's about to climb inside one. it's nice to see the scale relationship of the speaker mass to a human.

part louise nevelson, part moholy nagy, and part donald judd's nightmare; the cubes, curves, and cubby holes form a pretty wonderful piece of sculpture. the visual pleasures here are most likely an artifact of decisions that had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with acoustics; but there is certainly at least a small drifting cloud's worth of inspiration to be absorbed from the collision of forms.

if you look at it upside down it begins to feel like a space capsule or even like architecture. and if man and machine are one it becomes a tree of honeycomb complete with human trunk...