Skeletons

installation SOUNDSTAIR: Minnesota resides on the main stairway of Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. As participants move on the stairs, their movements are translated into sounds and amplified back onto the stairs. Both the musical scales and the timbre change throughout the day, from a major scale ofAfrican flutes, to Chinese pentatonic scale of acoustic guitars and the Minnesota bird, the loon. r ::JL4~Ja. SOUNDSTAIR: Minnesota is one in a series of Svundstairinstallations (Fig. 2) that I have created in the United States and Europe. Each installation is 'sound-specific', having been composed using, among other elements, the acoustics within the space as well as the indigenous sounds of the geographical region. Composed of a series of electronic sensing devices, a computer and a sampler/synthesizer, the permanent 94 Words On Works Fig. 2. Christopher Janney, Sonic Pass/de, permanent interactive sound environment, 8 x 56 x 10 ft, 1990. Participants moving through this space, at Techworld Plaza, Washington, D. C., trigger melodic notes as well as natural sounds. (Photo: Lucien Perkins) Fig. 3. James Johnson, Dead Air, artist's book, 1991. This work uses the artist's Skeletons type font with a series of words that complete phrases beginningwith the word 'Dead'. SKELETONS Jim Johnson, 3350 13th St., Boulder, CO 80304, U.S.A. E-mail: johnsonj@cubldr.colorado.edu The Skeletons type font (Fig. 3) was inspired by a low-tech form of mediathe rubber stamp. It began with the idea of designing a typeface using the image of a skeleton in the form of each letter of the alphabet. Prints were made with the stamps of the various body parts/bones assuming the position of a letterform. These were digitized and edited (turned into silhouettes) in a paint program. They were copied and pasted into a font program, where they were traced and scaled, spaced and kerned. The Skeletonsfont was created with the intention of using pictures (images of a different sort than letters) as letters that could be ordered to make words and pictures, both at the same time. This amounts to typing a picture and literally telling an illustrated story. The nature of the story was determined , in this case, by both the syntax of words and of images, the latter being the more difficult to describe, as it has not, for all intents and purposes , been formalized. Two works that use the Skeletons font are A Thousand Wordsand Dead Air. A Thousand Words is a work in progress comprised of a book set in the Skeletonsfont and an installation of the pages of the book in the form of paper tiles. The latter was installed at the CAGE Gallery in Cincinnati in April 1991 and covered one-third ofa wall 40 ft in length. Each page/tile of A Thousand Words consists of one word relating to human existence in general and represented more specifically by the skeleton letters. The work suggests several questions. Is a picture worth a thousand words? Are a thousand words worth one picture? Where is the picture? What is the picture? Dead Air is a book that was published inJuly 1991 using the same typeface to represent words completing various phrases beginning with the word 'dead', such as Dead Wrong, Dead Issue and Dead Heat. A book of three (or more) texts, it raises similar questions regarding the natures of both words and images and their prospective interchangeability, as well as those relating to text and information. ...