Megan and Murray

The Listening Array: Video

The Listening Array: Video*, 2008, Megan and Murray McMillan

Our current work, The Listening Array, has three distinct manifestations: a site-specific installation currently on view at Whittier College's Greenleaf Gallery, a large related photograph, and this video, which is shown on a television monitor incorporated into the installation.

Inspired by the social politics of the Reagan-era Cold War, issues of class and the notion of noblesse oblige — the concept of benevolent, honorable behavior that is considered to be the responsibility of persons of high birth or rank — The Listening Array is a study in the small personal interactions that influence the larger world.

The audio is from an 1878 Russian choral piece, Вы жертвою пали (You Fell Victims). Here's a translation of the last few stanzas:

And the tyrant is feasting in luxurious palaces
Drowning his anguish in wine
But the deadly hand is drawing
Threatening letters on the wall.

Tyranny shall fall and the people will rebel
The great powerful and free people
Farewell our brothers! You have walked with honor
Your road of worthiness and nobility.

We will keep the video on YouTube until the exhibition closes on April 4, 2008.

* YouTube doesn't allow resizing of its videos, which is the reason the video is cropped on this blog. We recommend double-clicking on the video to see it in its native YouTube setting rather than hitting the play button to watch it on our blog.

The Listening Array Installation

The Listening Array: Opening Tonight, 7-9pm

Megan and Murray McMillan, The Listening Array: Photograph, 2008, 25'' x 50'', ed. of 3

Our opening is tonight at Whittier College from 7-9pm (info).

Hope to see you there.

Building the Array (3)

We spent yesterday wiring and getting the structure ready for plastic, then last night our good friend and fellow artist Zach Kleyn came by to help attach the plastic (thanks Zach!). Today will be all-plastic / all-day.

Lecture is tonight at 7:15pm at the Alumni House on campus, info here.

Building the Array (2)

Yesterday we finished the wood frame. Today we'll wire the speaker system, install the AV equipment, and fasten and finish the plastic. If all goes according to schedule, we'll be done tonight.

The audio we're using in the video is from an 1878 Russian choral piece, Вы жертвою пали (You Fell Victims). Here's a translation of the last few stanzas:

And the tyrant is feasting in luxurious palaces
Drowning his anguish in wine
But the deadly (fatal) hand is drawing
Threatening letters on the wall.

Tyranny shall fall and the people will rebel
The great powerful and free people
Farewell our brothers! You have walked with honor
Your road of worthiness and righteousness (nobility).

[The rank of young (fresh) soldiers is following your footsteps
Ready to die and to accomplish high deeds
Farewell our brothers! You have walked with honor
Your road of worthiness and righteousness.]

Building the Array (1)

Yesterday we built about 65% of the wood frame structure for the array. Today we finish the frame and begin to attach the plastic skin. We're a bit ahead of schedule, but with things like this, something tricky always comes up so it's nice to have a time bonus.

It had been a while since we'd seen the gallery, and it's much more lovely than we remembered: hand-painted wood beam 20-foot ceilings, Moorish architectural details, iron chandeliers.

Lecture is Wednesday night and the opening is on Thursday.

The Listening Array: Audio

spectrogram of decoded sounds from a Russian selcall system [source]

One fascinating find in our research into this project was the existence of "Numbers Stations:" radio stations of unknown origin which broadcast strings of spoken numbers over shortwave radio in various languages. We had unknowingly crossed paths with this idea before, in Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which takes its title and many of the samples from a particular numbers broadcast.

Numbers stations are quite mysterious and have a dedicated following of shortwave radio enthusiasts and decoders. The running theory is that these stations are transmitting nearly unbreakable coded messages, but no one really knows, because no official agency will acknowledge their existence. Here's a story NPR did on the phenomena in 2004.

The Listening Array: Set Lighting Tests

Here are some working photos of our lighting tests over the last couple weeks.

The Listening Array: Essay

on the set at The Listening Array photo and video shoot

I have spent my week listening to secret tapes from Kennedy’s office during the Cuban Missile Crisis and reading the transcripts of Reagan and Gorbechev’s Cold War dinner parties in Reykjavik, Iceland. It all boils down to espionage, really, and the bug the Russians put in the U.S. seal at the American embassy in Moscow. That seal, plus fifty-year-old listening devices and gold halos in historical art: that’s the jist of this project.

It doesn’t necessarily make sense, and that used to bother me, back when I was suspicious of postmodern art, before I started making serious art myself. Yet it does make a kind of sense when you see it all in context. This project we're working on is called The Listening Array: a term that refers to a series of microphones connected in different intervals that correlate data to determine position. It’s a device used for spying. It’s also exactly what it sounds like: an arrangement of things that are used to listen. In this project, it references both meanings.

The Listening Array: Editing the Video

When we filmed The Listening Array last week we used a steadycam, a device that helps you hold the camera steady. This was our first time using one, and we found out it's a LOT harder than we anticipated. Walking is an up-and-down sort of thing. Getting the camera to move in a way that avoids that--even with expensive gear--is extremely difficult, and practically impossible with our limited experience.

Our best takes have jerks and bounces. Normally we would hand animate them out. We do a lot of micro-editing like this. By animating the video's scale, position and rotation in the opposite rate and amount that the camera jerks, you can theoretically remove unwanted camera movements. The problem, of course, is this takes a painful amount of time, patience and knowledge.

This is the kind of action, that in a perfect world would be done automatically by a computer.

I'm pleased to report that this time has arrived. To our delight, the new version of Apple's Final Cut Pro has this feature and it works extremely well, even on aggressively complicated movements.

Final Cut Pro on our Apple Computer took 30 minutes to analyze our two minute clip's motion and then mathematically altered the motion so the camera appears to move perfectly smooth. Almost too perfect. Amazing. In the clip above I've deactivated the "auto zoom" that hides how the computer fixes the clip. You can see how the computer smoothes the camera movement by looking at the clip's edges constantly rotating and scaling.