Experimental Station

In this exhibition of new work by Chicago-based sculptor and audio artist Paul Dickinson (a former Hallwalls Technical Director), the “works” are present and absent, before us and hidden from view, mute and alive with perpetual sound and activity. Three small wooden crates, fitted with visible air vents, sit in the gallery alongside a transformer and stereo speakers. Within each crate are hundreds of red worms wallowing in compost. The interior of each crate is fitted with microphones and infrared cameras, broadcasting visual and audio information to the “outside world.”

Music for Worms and Compost is a specific exploration of ambient sensory experience, a collating and broadcasting of sight and sound that cannot be predetermined or predicted. Isolating the worms as Dickinson has done creates a curious relationship—they are composting, but they are doing so within a rigidly-defined environment and remain dependent upon external sources for access to the nutrients that feed them. They are composting in an unnatural environment and are unable to feed off natural sources (rainwater, insects) that may be available in a compost recessed in the earth.

Dickinson’s contained environment is an eerie and acutely apt metaphor for our times. Increasingly cocooned into our own isolated spheres of existence, we are propelled and enabled in this relationship by technological advance. Technology becomes our environment and, increasingly, we become dependent upon external sources for information and sustenance. We become disturbingly like worms, chomping happily in the dark so long as we’re fed the proper nutrients.

The piece deals with multiple layers of remixing and creative relationships. There is a fluid context between composer/performer/audience in Music for Worms and Compost, as Dickinson establishes the environment in which his performers create works that cannot be anticipated for an audience, some of whom (gallery staff) are complicit in the work’s creation through feeding the performers. Part of the worms’ current diet includes shredded confidential papers, playfully breaching guidelines by retransmitting—albeit incoherently—confidential information.

by Albert Chao