I made a little sound sculpture - a sort of wind-powered banjo - for this weekend’s Figment Festival on Governors Island. Here it is installed on the island’s waterfront by Castle Williams, with a spectacular view of downtown Manhattan. (If you’re in the New York area, come to the festival this weekend - it’s free, and there’s eight million things to see.)
If the wind really picks up, the flowers will spin.
And here’s a video from when I was testing it on my deck.
Thanks to everyone who came to the 29 Noisy Noises party on March 1 and helped me celebrate finishing 29 instruments in 29 days! Lots of great people came over and made a lot of great noise on the 29 instruments — you can hear some of it below.
Here’s LEV, my theremin-playing robot first seen at Artbots 2003, playing a familiar song with the help of the newly built thumpbot and an obsolete synthesizer.
Time Out NY magazine has a small feature about handmade music nights at Etsy Labs, and it includes a little bit about me and a photo of one of my handmade music gadgets.
Etsy Labs, Create Digital Music, and Make Magazine have been holding a series of handmade music nights at Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters, where people share the musical gadgets they’ve made. It’s just been featured in Time Out NY (scan). CDM’s got nice wrapups of the first (with video, including me!) and second events.
Here’s a video of the wind-up noisemaker I made for the second handmade music night:
Misericordiam visited the Figment Festival on Governor’s Island, New York City, this July. For the first time, I suspended the piece from a tree in the open air rather than from an indoor framework. It was a beautiful day to hang accordions in trees. Here’s some video from the festival.
There’s no attempt to create a humanoid with Misericordiam, by Ranjit Bhatnagar, an accordion hung from a rope. It compresses and, thanks to gravity, decompresses with a convulsive abandon. I don’t know if it had any other purpose than humor, but I didn’t feel like I needed more.