I am a UK-based self-employed Art Technician, who travels around my local region to different galleries and museums to install art exhibitions.
Sometimes I handle famous and expensive artworks or priceless artifacts, but most of the time it’s probably artworks you’ve not heard of. This includes 2D work like paintings, 3D work like sculptures, video projections, screens, sound systems, computers, and room-filling installations. Sometimes we work directly with living artists to help produce their work.
Happy to talk about technical stuff i.e. how artworks are transported, packed, fixed to the wall, what sort of fittings are used, how an exhibition is spaced out, hung, arranged etc; or to talk about working in galleries, or any questions from artists about how to prepare works for exhibition etc
I’m also a practicing artist, and historically both a filmmaker and gallery curator - so happy to answer things relating to that sort of thing too.
Because it’s a pretty niche job I may have to keep some details vague for privacy etc.
I’m doing a public talk fairly soon on “what I do”, and I need to know what sort of things people are potentially interested in, so I can focus more on those in the talk - so any relevant questions would be really helpful to me, thank you.
It’s really hard to pin down, sorry - I’ve been involved in these things for about 20 years, and though I used to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of every thing I’d seen or been involved in, I’m beginning to struggle to remember specific names of things. There’s been comparatively few “sound only” or pure audio sculpture works that I’ve installed, they’ve often been a part of something which also included physical sculpture, painting or other computer/audiovisual elements.
A few bits that spring to mind (and one named thing), were ones with quadrophonic (or more) sound. We’re very used to stereo being used everywhere, but I think the first time I was in the middle of a space-filling sound installation, and found that I could sort of “change the sound mix” by walking around the space, or by other people walking through the space, was quite special. I can’t remember exactly what it was though - but since then, I’ve always been really interested in audio works with multiple channels. I remember one with a circle of 8 (or 16?) of these small, but powerful Genelec speakers on poles, all pointing into the centre of this circle, but I can’t actually remember what it sounded like, other than it was awesome.
The only thing I can remember by name and approximate content was an installation and performance thing called “National Grid”, where the performers were somehow running the 50hz signal of mains electricity through… art stuff… to create this sort of massive, pulsing drone/wub-wub-wub sound, and being in the middle of it was just so immense, like a sort of beat-less rave.
I’ve also got a fondness for algorithmic/mathematical compositions and compositions made from non-traditional objects (I think I once went to see a dot-matrix printer orchestra, or perhaps it was floppy disk drives?, for example). I was also once involved in a test run for an event as part of a sound-art festival that included raising two old (on their way to be scrapped) pianos up on cranes, then swinging them together like conkers, to smash together in the middle and making… whatever sound it was going to make… sort of the loudest chord ever played, with a sort of explodey sound either side of it.