Pickup Coil Wire Received!

Posted on September 24, 2017

Wednesday I received the pickup coil and magnets I ordered. From this point, I started working on the pickup flatwork, the pieces of plastic that hold the magnets and coil in place. For this to work efficiently, I went to the Concordia Digital Fab Lab where I could test cutting plexiglas with laser to prepare the holes for the magnets. Due to other engagements, I was only able to test this on Friday late afternoon, and the dimensions I measured were slightly off. I will have to ensure that I spend time on this next week.

Literature

Having finished États Seconds, I started reading Perturbations, another book of analyses and interviews about Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. Although this book is both in French and in English, it is seemingly originally written in French, and translated by non-native English speakers. Here is the in-book translation of a quote that really resonated with me:

And in fact, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot remains recalcitrant non only regarding all hermeneutics interpretation of his work, but even regarding all attempt at discussion of the subject. Above and beyond the intentional semantic mutism of his works, it’s this that the artist continually harks back to with Samuel Bianchini and Christoph Cox: “at work” here is listening, and “suspended” here is the question of meaning… Whence the difficulty for his contributors […], beyond indicative correlation, in going beyond simple description of the [apparatus] and their effects, or in providing referential bearings […]

While I was playing guitar for Appalaches, we were willfully refusing to provide meaning or context to our music. We were writing instrumental rock, we had no message to convey but emotions, and the names of our pieces were oftentimes portmanteaus of many things, not necessarily related to the pieces themselves. There is something similarly obscure and indirect that Bousier-Mougenot’s artworks seem to approach.

Sketches and Architecture

As I mentioned before, I want to explore the Brutalist architectural movement for inspiration of shapes. As architecture, the movement feels really oppressive, even if it is not its intention.

As an aside, there were a lot of Brutalist-inspired buildings built for workers in France. The movie Buffet Froid, set in 1979 in a not-yet inhabited Brutalist neighbourhood, is a dark comedy in which the characters are driven crazy by the oppressive architecture.

I do not intend to oppress the audience of the artwork onto which I am working, but I do need to keep this in mind. Here are a few sketches that I have done so far. Nothing impressive, but I am trying to understand some structures and warm up my hand for sketching.

Le Corbusier – Unité d’habitation

Lina Bo Bardi – São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP)

Johannes van den Broek, Jaap Bakema – Aula of the Technical University in Delft

This structure is really interesting. The shape and lines of the building remind of the 1980s Japanese animated series Transformers Headmasters, in which futuristic vehicles had hard and blocky shapes.

Clorindo Testa and SEPRA – Banco de Londres y América del Sur Headquarters

The shapes of this building are quite interesting, as they are not completely made of straight lines. The openings remind of the sound holes of acoustic guitars.