Pump (dis)Organ
5/9/24
40’ x 8’ x 4’
PVC pipe, rubber gloves, metal scraps, tubing and hoses, foot pumps
A pump organ spanning 5 floor of the List stairwell. The first floor houses 4 footpumps. On floors 2 through 5 are horns that each have their respective pitch controls on the floor they are placed at, and are all connected to the pump through long tubes.
Pump (dis)Organ example network
With this project, I was very much interested in exploring the same principles as the Hexadeca-kit, but now with the added focus points of distance, volume, scale, and tonal instrumentation. How can artistic collaborators move beyond large distances to create together, all while encouraging this creativity to exist in the same non-hierarchical space that the Hexadeca-kit champions? How will sound overtake such a resonant space like the List stairwell? And how can music-making resist traditional ideas of order when the sound making process resembles and sounds closer to a traditional instrument?

Because of the technical complexity of this project and time restraints, I do think I could have designed the interactive elements of the piece to be more conducive to chance musical creation, and to generally meet my goals better. If there had been a pump at each floor, not only would the fluid mechanics work better as far as getting the horns to sound after travelling upwards through such long tubes, but there could be more conversation between people at different floors. The first floor controls all sound output, and all other floors can only control pitch, which lends itself to an unbalanced creative dynamic.