Image of notebook with title Plugholes

I've made a lot of work that translates the digital to the physical (and sometimes back again). More recently, I've been wanting to make work which isn't about the medium, but allows the ideas and stories to be central, and lets the medium fade away. I've been making games (https://adesertdrawing.itch.io/fruitflies) where the game part dissolves, leaving space for reflection. I thought for this residency, I would like to continue this idea by exploring ways to hide experiences in "Actual Reality".

Many years ago, I came back from living abroad and was struck by how much I had missed the shape of the plugholes, like an old friend. You don't realise how much time you spend brushing your teeth, just staring at that shape in a subconscious state, while your brain tries to make sense of the day. I started drawing them. After a while, I started adding sentences: thoughts and phrases that emerged from the plughole in that neutral mental state.

Image of notebook with writing Don't do anything for a pat on the head

I've been wanting to build a physical version, in situ, where a voice would emanate from a plughole, spouting these aphorisms at the unsuspecting sink-user. But it was important that the audience should have some agency - some ability to shut off the stream of subconsciousness. For the residency, I wanted to explore how this could be done by hacking a sensor tap to react to the user's action, to drown out the voice as they activate the tap. 

I've been experimenting with ways to do this. It's important that the audio switches from the voice to the gargling voice and back again whilst staying on the same timeline. The easiest way to do this, rather than switching between 2 audio files and having the issue of keeping the 2 files synced up over countless loops seemed to be to split them across the left and right channels of a stereo mp3. With an enormous amount of help from Martin and Tarim with wiring and coding, using a Bare Conductive board, we have a test version which switches between the voice reading the sentences and the voice gargling the sentences when the tap is activated. I recorded 5 seconds of audio (one looped sentence about an unimpressed seagull) for testing. I think it's fair to say neither Martin nor I ever need to hear that sentence again.

Image of tap and bare conductive board

For the full version, choosing which texts to include has been quite difficult as they don't all follow the same genre - some are quite stern imperatives, and others more observational. I'm not sure if I agree with all of them, necessarily. The order also needs care - spacing out the similar ones and varying the tone out evenly. Thankfully I've got some help for this process.

Image of a cat playing with paper

Next: plumbing.