wikiGong - Soundwalk Artists

wikiGong is a collective dedicated to cataloging the sounds of large public structures for creative purposes such as assembling virtual instruments. Our guiding metaphor is the large Indonesian gamelan ensemble—the gong gede—each of which is tuned around its own unique, stationary, and finely crafted gong ageng—the large gong, which provides the communal heartbeat. Our leap of faith: civil engineering produces artifacts akin to the gong gede, reflecting both the scale of their collective will and our sense of culture, community, and history, a glimpse of the Zeitgeist. Their ongoing mission: to mine and expose the timbral content of these structures as data sets, presenting it in the guise of musical instruments for re-use, improvisation, enjoyment, and evolution. As an ongoing collaboration devoted to performance as an artifact, wikiGong embarks on an exploration and discovery: an event you stumble on at the intersection of music, art, and technology; a found instrument hundreds of strangers can play at once; a script written in ice, turning to fog halfway through Act II.

For SoundWalk 2011, Mission Control/imaginary voices was an interactive performance inspired by humanity’s first fifty years in space, our soon-to-be bygone Space Age. Audience contributions will be solicited for live broadcast, providing the Gods of Internet Technology can be propitiated in proper season.

For SW2012 wikiGong’s Looking Backward considers LA’s Bradbury Building as a lonely fragment, stranded by the deliquescence of the American Progressive Movement. Reminded that history is written by the victors, wikiGong embraces the new order and kneels at the altar of spam with Oracle du Jour. wikiGong will also reprise a few previous works and play recent musique concrète recordings.

wikiGong is…

Dave Ayer—situational architecture Prior to launching wikiGong.com in 2009, Dave built sound sculpture and helped found and retire the 1980′s DIY band The Potato Engineers.
Rebecca Ayer—virtuosic musical gestures, melody, and memorabilia Rebecca is a music educator and performer who frequently collaborates on works by sound artist Dave Ayer.
Jacob Dickinson—navigation, narrative, daguerreotypes Jacob's search for a digital/physical media sweet spot in photography and printmaking informs his contributions to wikiGong.com and ccMixter.org. He is CTO of Ecologico-Logic and founding partner of Sprezza Consulting.