Musical hacker Dmitry Morozov—alias ::vtol::—who only last week directed a symphony of robots, wants to destroy our smartphones for the sake of art. For his latest project, Oil, the Russian artist invited exhibition visitors to crush their possessions beneath one of five hydraulic presses. In exchange for their material sacrifices? Participants were awarded with 20-minute albums of algorithmically-generated audio produced by the deformation of their phones, cameras, or maneki-neko figurines.
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Each of the Oil stations consists of a specialized microphone, an Arduino Uno microcontroller board, a 10-ton hydraulic press, a Mac Mini, and an Apple CD drive. When visitors pump levers, the punch steadily approaches the object until an ominous crunching and cracking signals the commencement of the destruction. "The main idea of this project is to present exhibition visitors with the chance to destroy any object that might happen to be on their person, in order to transform it into a unique sound composition," ::vtol:: explains in his artist's statement, "The project is intended to provoke visitors into spontaneously ridding themselves of material consumer objects for the sake of creating their own individual work of art via deprivation, divestment and destruction.”Over the course of the installation, which was commissioned by Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 1,574 tracks of commercial crushing were recorded. Listen to the sweet sound of artistic algorithms and watch as Phillips phones crumble and Japanese cats (literally) lose their heads:
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