Allow me to stereotype you. You are young, grew up in or very close to a city, actively interact with natural settings less than once a week, do not own a telescope, are not currently aware of what phase the Moon is in. You have a GPS for your car and not your backpack (phones don’t count). Now let’s say that every one of those things is wrong and you are in fact wicked engaged with natural environments all of the time. Still, still, you aren’t quite there. Pardon the romantization and brief disregard for biology and evolution and philosophical distinctions of “nature,” but you are not currently in sync with the things happening in the world that are not human-derived systems or products. Human beings ability win at natural selection via big brains and thus technology has a whole lot to do with that. Weather can still kill; seasons still change — but really we’re pretty good at minimizing even these things. Daylight, however, is not so easy.Have you ever worked a night job? It sucks. My longest stint was a little over a year working as a nightporter at a hotel in Portland. By the time it ended, I felt less than human. Try it. Anyhow, daylight is the best thing going and if you can somehow get beyond it, you’re a couple steps up the evolutionary ladder than me. Sunlight’s a thing I love the idea of being even closer to; rewire me for photosynthesis, please. In the meantime, technology and the impressive brain of Craig Colorusso have given us the ability to enjoy music composed by the sun, or at least arranged by it. This is Colorusso’s Sun Boxes project, an array of speakers and solar cells designed to interpret sunlight and its shifting relative magnitudes into music. The full-scale installation debuted in 2009 in the desert outside of Las Vegas (we talked to him not long after); in late-February, Colorusso released an app version of the project.The idea is this: a Sun Box has a single guitar loop stored in it. The box is modulated based on the magnitdude/breadth of the sun’s rays (interpreted as heat) and their angle relative to the box. With 25 or so spread out over a small region, you’ll get one slowly shifting b-flat “overtone overdose,” as Michaelangelo Matos described it in Capital New York. “I am humbled by the piece on a daily basis,” Colorusso told me an interview a couple of weeks ago. “Every time it’s installed I hear and see new things. Once I started to think about music outside of the parameters of song, the world became a very big place.”The idea reminds a bit of J.G. Ballard’s sound sculptures, showing up in a couple of the late sci-fi author’s short stories (and maybe a novel?) — twisting shapes out in some barren desert, growing and changing and becoming through forces beyond their creator. “Having applied this music to sculpture has made the world even bigger but more connected,” says Colorusso. "The coolest reaction, is when people say Sun Boxes have altered the space. The piece allows space to slow down and see all the things that unfold over time. The volume is loud enough to engulf the participants but with enough space to allow for ambient sounds of the landscape to enter the mix. Traffic, bird sounds, wind, dogs barking, people talking even an ambulance, all these things are presented in a musical context with Sun Boxes.“When you first hear or see Sun Boxes, you are part of it,” he says. “You decide how close you get. I don’t like telling people what to do, but I often find myself encouraging people to enter the array. It sounds better in there. The piece surrounds the participant.”With the app, you can play the tones yourself, or distribute the tones among a group of people sporting smart-phones. It’s an imperfect analog but you’re getting close, at least. Interestingly, there’s also a Sun Boxes 7" out. “The piece itself will last several months,” Colorusso says, “so the absurdity of making a Sun Boxes 7” is not beyond me. But at the same time, I like 7"s and i don’t think i’ll ever be able to shake my fondness for colored vinyl. I see the record more like an object that is tied to Sun Boxes than a unit in the music biz. My art is not precious; it is meant for the masses."SUN BOXES CRAIG COLORUSSO // University of West Florida 3.06-3.08.12 from TAG UWF on Vimeo.A few weeks ago, Colorusso had the boxes installed at the University of West Florida (above). It wound up being one of the most extreme settings the boxes have been in. (One wonders about the boxes capability for creating out and out noise given the right setting.) “The last day was cloudy, so the Boxes were starting and stopping,” he says. “I see an experience like that as a variation of the piece. And it’s beautiful. This was not an intention from the start, but the idea that you don’t always get what you want, when you want it, comes up quite a bit. All I see are possibilities.”Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv, @everydayelk.
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