Inspiration
I was inspired by a piece in the show created by Haroon Mirza – a complex audio-visual installation assembled out of domestic furniture, electronic equipment and lights. Regaining a Degree of Control, was created for BAS7 and uses previously unseen footage of Ian Curtis, the post-punk band Joy Division’s songwriter, lyricist and singer.
Curtis’s song ‘She’s Lost Control (1978) concerns a girl with epilepsy, a condition that Curtis himself suffered from and to which the strobe light in Mirza’s installation refers. Here , as in much of Mirza’s work, the central proposition is about transforming noise into sound, and making hearing and listening as important and relevant as seeing and looking. His aim, he says, is to ‘explore visual and acoustic space as one sensorial mode of perception’.
I did not like the fact that Haroon had stapled the vinyl record Unknown Pleasures – however I could see why it had been done because it was creating a noise as it rotated on turntable. I love the album and the logo that was created for it by Peter Saville as suggested by the drummer Stephen Morris. The lines are the sound wave pulses from the first pulsar discovered PSR B1919+21. There is not track information the only way to tell the difference between ‘side1’ and ‘side 2’ was that the logo appeared reversed.
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