shut up and listen! 2024
Permanente Präsentationen @ echoraum, 10. bis 12. Oktober 2024
Mel E. Logan: Leaky Bucket, Couch Potato
Interaktive Klanginstallation
Eröffnung: 10. Oktober 2024, 19:00
Leaky Bucket, Couch Potato
Hold your hand close to the antenna in order to play the sound. The words in the sound piece are the names given to spyware, surveillance programs which are used to listen in and watch the general public, yes, you, too. The Guardian published many of these collected names in 2014 after WikiLeaks redacted information and leaked this on their platform. The main source for material is the published thesis of Jakob Appelbaum. With The installation ‘Leaky Bucket, Couch Potato’ I have built a culture Feed-back giving the visitors working materials to play the names of systems which play around with their privacy. Rather than finger pointing we can use our limbs for instigating music out of skewed buckets, repurposing working tools. A bucket is a working tool, but is a leaky bucket useless? This depends on what is leaked – I think the terminology makes leaks sound accidental whereas publishing sounds established but old and controlled. I see a flip of where truth can be found and this flip might just be in an upside down bucket.
[Mel E. Logan]
Mel E. Logan
Mel E. Logan is a Vienna and Munich based artist whose work spans and hybridises electronic music, performance and installation. She gathers groups of artists, thinkers, technologists to connect themes of fiscal, digital rights. In the tradition of avant-garde her works oscillate between authenticity and the subaltern, touch on theory with a detour into artificial exaggeration. Her growing interest in electromagnetism and sound instruments range from the mechanical and fantastical, spawning devices and systems for sound sculpture, installation and interactive performance. Logan studied painting at the Academy of Arts in Munich, where she founded Chicks on Speed (CoS) collective with her colleagues there. Over the 25 years of its evolution, CoS has developed a collaborative system of rotating members who develope sound devices, install their exhibitions, and teach seminars. Their collaborations center on an ethic comprised of learning by doing, open source, and a material practice of building Objektinstruments — ‘instruments’ without the instrumentality, sound devices, some of them wearable, that combine emerging technologies with basic mechanics. Logan has worked in theater, producing music in addition to performing for the theater director Angela Richter at Schauspiel Köln and HAU. Supportive and building a platform to support FLINTA artists and musicians, Logan hosted GirlMonster at Kampnagel Theater from 2010-2013. Invited guests include Vaginal Davis, YoMajesty, FEMEN, Le Chick from Taiwan, Lady Bitch Ray and Gustav from Vienna, just to name a few. In 2017 Logan founded UniCAT UG as an artist-run label, investigating web 3 and smart contracts and music distribution. Building a system for music to reach into the publishing world via archive system. As a vocalist Logan is best known for her nonchalance spoken word on Kaltes Klares Wasser, a remix of the Malaria! Classic piece which made it into the German Dance Charts. Logan has recorded Mentally Naked and Good Weather Girl with Captain Mustache, both songs are reaching the playlists and are getting radio rotation. As an electronic producer, Logan releases as VooCha. With CoS, Logan has exhibited, performed and lectured at diverse locations: Sonar, PrimaveraSound, Whisky a gogo in LA, The Filmore, The Kitchen, NY, SXSW and at Kyoto Contemporary Art Museum, MoMA, Palais de Tokyo, Pompidou, Dundee Contemporary Center for the Arts; TBA-21 Vienna, CAC Vilnius, Tate Britain, Big Day Out festival tour in Australia and the Victoria & Albert Museum just to name a few.