Siren
January 18th, 2007 by SBLondon is fabulous for cramming strange and unusual things into glorious murky alcoves.
My favorite such hideout was that one cybercafe in Camden market, the one under the viaduct where all the antiques stalls are. It smelled musty and moldy and the tea was poisonously strong. The LAN Quake players clearly had no idea what time it was or if it was light outside or what, and their beady, bleary eyes said volumes about how much they didn’t care.
It was a great spot to eat a crepe and check your shell account, and it was only a couple of pounds an hour.
It was a great use of urban waste space, but now the ubiquitous They have come up with even better reason to go down a dark, dank tunnel (like you needed one).
According to the website, ‘Siren’, by theremin player and artist Ray Lee, is “‘a whirling, spinning spectacle of mechanical movement, electronic sound and light.” The machines are tripods of varying sizes which spin, blink and generate a trancey droning soundscape. During each 40-minute perfromance the operator/ performers duck and weave between machines, tweaking the sound and genrally trying not to get hit.
There’s a decent interview with Ray Lee the artist in the Telegraph, here.
As an installation, ‘Siren’ will be available for viewing at the newish Kinetica Museum for kinetic art.
As a performance, ‘Siren’ runs through tomorrow, in a remarkable place called The Shunt Vaults. The lounge in the shunt vaults sounds like my internet cafe of yore, but hey! There’s alcohol! And art! The Shunt Lounge is a theater/art space and bar which will have a membership but now is free to enter.
The website expresses the happenings thusly:
Each week will be curated by a different Shunt artist. Some will fill the sapce with nonstop entertainment, some will do next to nothing. Fortunately the bar staff are more reliable.
Sounds like you couldn’t have a better time down a dark deep hole unless you were Alice.
