–
Mudam Publics Summer Project
For its summer project, Mudam’s Publics Department invited the Japanese creator Yuri Suzuki to conceive Looks Like Music, an audiovisual installation based on his work Colour Chaser. This consists of a miniature robot which detects and follows a circuit – a black line traced in marker pen – interspersed with coloured reference points that the device translates in sound. The public is invited to actively contribute to the development of the installation in the exhibition space by extending the circuit drawn on paper. Visitors thus participate in the creation of a large-scale artwork and enrich a collectively composed sound piece. A series of events and workshops accompanies the project during the month of August.
Yuri Suzuki is a sound artist, designer and electronic musician whose recent work explores the physical and technological characteristics of sound production, an interest that has arisen since the loss of the music library stocked in his laptop when the hard drive crashed.
For his Royal College of Art graduation show in 2008, he presented work which involved an innovative way of playing conventional vinyl records, including Sound Chaser (a miniature electric circuit constructed from pieces of old records on which small cars circulate and transmit sound) and the Finger Player, a transmitter handled like a thimble, enabling the physical experience of the retransmission of sound by running a finger along a record.
Suzuki’s intention is ‘‘to raise public awareness of the way in which sound and music is produced’’ and in most cases this occurs through performances and workshops requiring public participation. For Mudam Summer Project he is therefore presenting workshops led by invited artists and creators that tackle a variety of themes such as learning the basic principles of electronic music and the creation of sound pieces using transformed objects.
Yuri Suzuki was born in Tokyo in 1980 and now lives in London and Stockholm. His installations and sound pieces have been presented in exhibitions around the world. Between 1999 and 2005 he collaborated with the art department of the Japanese firm Maywa Denky where he became interested in music and technology. He moved to London in 2005 for his studies at the Royal College of Art, during which he undertook projects for Yamaha and Moritz Waldemeyer. After graduating in 2008, he founded his own firm in London. In 2011, he became guest designer and artist of the Teenage Engineering collective in Stockholm. In 2013, he launched Dentaku Ltd, a research and development consultancy working for companies such as Widen+Kennedy, KK Outlet and AIAIAI.
