Pipes
2019
Pipes is a permanent installation at Cato Square in Prahran.
28 11 metre tall ‘pipes’ are distributed in four groups of seven at the corner entrances to the Square. Each inward face houses six vertically stacked 200 x 800mml LED screens programmed by Ramus and 2 loudspeakers (6 inch diameter), customised with flexible focal points, through which a 28 channel ambient soundscape by Christopher Williams is heard.
Incorporated into the soundscape are fragments of a work called ‘Cooee Song’, a multichannel sound work that has embedded in it a story about an orphaned and exiled Indigenous figure.
Considering the ‘publicness’ of this new 9000 square metre public space, Pipes seeks to bring a new level of subtlety and sophistication to the challenge of creating ‘sense of place’. The elegant ‘pipes’ can be thought of as acupuncture needles opening up blocked veins in the ground: there are allusions in the sound and video to ancient shorelines and the former seasonal wetlands. There is also reference to the former importance of textile production, clothes design and retail associated with the area.
The creative template guiding content development challenged us to avoid explicit references to historical associations; instead, to incubate ‘sense of place’ through ‘an encounter with ‘new possibilities’ whose internal coherence and patterning suggests the existence of a ghost community whose values are at home and whose sources (predominantly in overlooked visual and acoustic signatures collected in the area) sets up an echoic dialogue between the inside of the work and the realtime world it occupies.