Kvartira-11 / New New (2023)

Be cautious, authorities might be listening!

Flat-11 / New New is my final year BA(Hons) Interaction Design course work at The Glasgow School Of Art.
This work is mixing references from personal experience supported by historical context of Post-Soviet Space.
The video abow is a visual summary documentation of my journey through the project.

^{Soviet Plastic Door Sign 110 to 11, 2023 
Intentionally modified from 110 to 11. It’s the symbol of the environment where I grew up. Because of the product shortages during USSR sometimes people would have to get creative with the little they have so did I when failed to find an actual door sign with “11” on it.} 

After an unfortunate accident with a Soviet radio falling on the concrete floor I’ve decided to give it a second breath by reusing the original mono speaker with a new FM receiver instead of old AM one.

While working on this project I was interested in using found objects and making them part of the design in the newly created interface and curated exhibition space for The Glasgow School Of Art Degree Show, 2023.

^{VEF-206 Soviet Radio, Made in The USSR in 1974.
Photo by Dommé Ewan, 2023}

^{Perestroika of VEF-206, AM to FM Receiver Replacement, 2023}

While doing research on the development of the USSR subculture for my dissertation I’ve made a decision to interpret certain cultural concepts of social interactions within sound installation inspired by DIY culture in the Pre and Post-Soviet Union. I am reflecting on the Soviet past in my home country, where 50 years of Russification left 50% of Russophones in Riga, capital of Latvia, including myself. 

My childhood was in the early 90s after the collapse of the USSR. I remember flat parties my parents would host while living in a tiny flat within the Soviet Tenement of the 1-464 series. Diverse music was played ranging from Russian Rock and Pop, to German Techno, not forgetting my grandmother’s favourite band - Modern Talking. In this environment I grew up into a ‘mélomane’, but without any opportunities for studying music professionally.

By immersing myself into the Alternative subculture in my youth and learning to play guitar, I realised that you do not necessarily need a diploma to make music. After years of collaborating  with different musicians, bedroom producers on music projects and experimenting with sound production myself I am realising that with the development of Digital Audio Workstation, you can even forget about learning a music instrument at times.

My piece is made from typical everyday objects which could be found in every Soviet flat and these act as sound triggers using capacitive sensing technology. Samples you hear are pre-recorded sounds of objects, snippets of songs with sentimental value, or basic chords with customly recorded and processed sounds. 

In this setup you can find enough chords to put the right sequence to play a Soviet Anthem and a lot of your favourite songs. All the noise you are making on this proletarian table is transmitted to the radio which is located on the different spot within ehxibition space. 


<sup>“Kvartira-11” 1st Setup during Work In Progress Show in the Reid Building of The Glasgow School Of Art.
Photo by Dommé Ewan, 2023

Schematic layout of the table with space and relationships adjustments between objects after reflection on the Work In Progress Show mostly improvised setup, 2023</sup>

Imagining Song Patterns is an extension to my Data Visualisation project at The Glasgow School Of Art where I followed the concept “music as data”. I always perceived music from an emotional standpoint even though I am aware that a big part of it is structure, so creating visuals from numbers turned out to be a new and exiting area to explore. The way I was planning this project from the very beginning was taking multiple songs/pieces from different genres and compare outcome patterns. Finally, I have got chance to revisit this idea during GSA Open Share weeks and bring it to satisfying conclusion.

Each pattern is generated from MIDI file data after conversion to CSV (comma-separated values), so it displayed in a different form than traditional sheet music. Starting from the top all the parts for track 1, then 2, 3, etc. I took 5 genres: Rock/New Wave; Rap/Trap; Progressive Metal/Rock; Modern Pop; Classical, 2 songs in each genre, then I assigned colour palettes to different ranges. In general there are 11 possible ranges, from 1 to 10 contains 12 numbers which are 12 notes of an octave: C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B. However, 11th range has 6 note shorter than other 10 ranges. During my experimentations I did not discover any song which would go extremely low or high, so the colours for these ranges did not make it to final patterns.

A big part of my art practice is to work with colour and, being maximalist in that aspect, I created 5 sets of colours for ranges in each genre. Some of them are similar but I tried to move them around so the results are not looking the same. In general, I have used a lot of colours so the changes in range are more visible on the final pattern.Despite being maximalist in colour, when it comes to the graphical part of visual work I am strongly influenced by the Bauhaus movement and constructivism. This is giving me inspiration to manipulate simple geometric shapes in many ways to get different results.

While working on this project I asked myself the questions: Will the pattern for modern pop song look smooth? Will the pattern of metal song be quite abrupt because of precise and defined rhythms we usually hear? There are many aspects such length, complexity of the arrangement, repetition. Not surprisingly, the most simple looking patterns were in Rap songs and the most complex ones in classical pieces. Obviously, just a few songs is not enough to do any judgments on different genres, but I will have to admit that when I was taking certain songs I already had vision of how the final result will look.

The motivation behind this visual experiment is to analyse how digitalisation is affecting popular culture - a topic that became dominating in my projects this year. With development of technology, tools which used to be accessible only for professionals now are part of the simple user’s world. As a result we are producing an enormous amount of creative products. Musicians do not necessarily have to practice as much as they used to during wax cylinder times, bad timing is fixable with audio software tools, bad pitch with auto-tune, just as visual artists not necessarily having the skill of drawing a straight line as it is 2-second job on the computer. To learn new skill is easier than ever with couple words in the browser search, but all the knowledge is laying on the surface and we do not necessarily want to go into depth considering overflow of information.

The rhetorical question would be: "Is modern age human losing the ability to perceive more complex information and 4 chord structured songs on the Billboard is what we actually want to hear, or have we not discovered the full potential of digital tools in order to progress and more Magnum Opuses yet to come?"