Siren

It’s a dark room in the Round­house Com­mu­nity Cen­tre. There are about two dozen metal tripods of vary­ing heights posi­tioned around the room. They are topped by bars hold­ing elec­tronic loud­speak­ers at each end. At the appointed time two men walk around with tiny screw­drivers and acti­vate the devices.   First they light up and emit tones of dif­fer­ent fre­quen­cies and even­tu­ally they all start to spin at dif­fer­ent speeds. The audi­ence can walk around the room and find which cor­ners or nooks offer the best tone poem. The whole thing lasts about 45 min­utes. This is Siren, a sound art/performance instal­la­tion by British artist Ray Lee.  For a great idea of how cool it looks and sounds watch this video. One of the neat things that hap­pens at PuSh is the Children’s Choice Awards, awards handed out by a group of ele­men­tary school kids from Sur­rey. They get fer­ried around to all the per­for­mances and sure enough, they turned up at Siren. The kids enjoyed almost get­ting their heads lopped off by whirling loud­speak­ers, bob­bing around to dis­tort the sound and puls­ing their fin­gers over their ears. I think this one was a hit. The last per­for­mances of Siren are on Jan­u­ary 24th at 4, 7 and 8:30.