I'm a pretty quiet guy....

until someone sticks a microphone in front of me and starts asking questions about my art practice. A couple of weeks ago I did an interview for (NAISA) New Adventures in Sound Art's radio show on CKLN 88.1 FM in Toronto. You can listen to me go on and on about my art work and listen to some tracks on this podcast on Sound Cloud here.-------> Ken's interview Fortunately they edited it down to under an hour in duration.

wind coil sound flow in San Jose after show interweb round up

Rich Lem's Flickr pics

bbchin's set on Fkickr

review by Julia Bradshaw

Brian Kane

The Exhibitionist

Start Silver Creek preview

Rudy Ruckers Blog

opening night in San Jose

Check out these photos from Garnet Hertz. ------> opening night

California road trip

We took most of Sunday off to drive up California's coastal highway to San Fransisco and north of there the Muir Woods. The day was overcast and cool. On the way back I took a few wrong ramps off the freeway and got us sort of lost in SF. Which was fine because we found a great place to eat and got to experience driving the hills of SF. Chris wound up the GPS unit and we found our way back to San Jose.

Progress in South Hall



Davenport







Half Moon Bay




Golden Gate Bridge



Muir Woods





Thai in San Fransisco

Return to San Jose

We're working hard getting everything done for the festival. It's been a really good experience so far with only a few hitches.

ZERO1's themed Build You Own World festival and exhibition September 16 - 19 in San Jose.

Out of the Garage Into the World

wind coil sound flow at 01SJ Biennial September 4 - 19 2010.












Our neighbors Gift Horse and Empire Drive -in









Chris builds our own table saw with the circular saw and our work bench.



Our off cut bowling game prototype.

August 2010 news

wind coil sound flow at 01SJ Biennial September 4 - 19 2010.

I will be presenting my kinetic sound sculpture wind coil sound flow at the San Jose City Hall Rotunda as part of ZERO1's themed Build You Own World festival and exhibition September 16 - 19 at San Jose California. In addition I will be participating in the Out of the Garage Into the World program (a part of the festival)September 4 -15 with building the installation components at the South Hall, a large convention space open to the public as part of the exhibition.

Curator Steve Dietz describes the festival here---> podcast .



Shadow Machine performance in Vancouver. September 23- October 31

After rocking the festival in San Jose, I'll be zipping back to Vancouver B.C to participate in 5 weeks of workshopping, rehearsals and performances with Peter Courtemanche, Carol Sawyer and Alvin Erasga Tolentino.

for more info -----> co.erasga.dance.

in the studio

In addition to all the work with the garden, I've been spending a lot of time in the studio getting things ready for upcoming shows in San Jose and Vancouver. There's lots to do. With the final drop off of crate contents to be prepared for shipping to San Jose, I shifted from work on wind coil sound flow to the preparation of devices for the Shadow Machine in Vancouver.





I finally wired up this hacked mobility scooter so it can be controlled by remote control. This forms the base of a 'wandering' workbench which will be used during the performance. So far it works well but now it's time to sort out all the wiring and mechanics for the final version.



It's easy for me to be distracted by an interesting challenge. We learned how to crack the combination for the safe that was left here by the previous tenants. With Tim Hunkin's lecture about the fine art of safe cracking in the back of my mind, we carefully worked out the 6 numbers to the combinations and the opening procedures for the two exterior door locks. What made it relatively easy was the fact that the door was already open and we could look inside the tumbler enclosure to see what was happening with the mechanism. I found a 3D animation of how tumbler based combination locks work too.

more yard

Prototype bench I made for the wind coil sound flow installation at the 2010 01SJ Biennial Build You Own World exhibition in San Jose. The basic idea is to build some places to sit for folks that want to check out the installation for a period of time. The design is based on the angles, materials and construction methods used to make the installation.
This bench is going into the back yard garden.

wind coil sound flow at U of W

The exhibition continues until October 31. Everything is going very well. There's a great article about it in the current Uptown Magazine by Sandee Moore. I'm already getting ready to take it down on November 1. The Gallery 1CO3 blog has tons more photos. And check out Gallery 1CO3's facehook page for more photos. Big thanks to Glen and Chris for all the construction/installation help, Milena for all the curatorial work, and Jennifer for keeping things running.

Steve Dietz's photos here--> wind coil sound flow

wind coil sound flow exhibition prep

It seems like a long time ago(a year?) that I hastily sketched the following drawing to somehow visualize my idea for a new artwork installation only minutes from mailing my proposal off. Now called wind coil sound flow, I'm preparing it for exhibition for the second time here in Winnipeg. The exhibition opens on Thursday October 1 at Gallery 1C03 at the University of Winnipeg. Checkout their blog and on facialhook . This production is co-sponsored by Video Pool and send and receive. More pictures soon.







And here's another one string slide guitar for the Scrap Yard Guitars workshop at the Graffiti Gallery coming up October 14.

New Adventures in Sound Art

Amongst all the other things I have been up to are the preparations to participate in a residency in Toronto with the NAISA folks August 4-9. I'll be giving a workshop on how to build electro-magnetic coils for sound art based applications, running the Kite Lab, giving an artist talk on wind coil sound flow at the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium 2009 , and hopefully giving a performance, Against the Wind. I write hopefully because it's an outdoor event and very dependent on the weather conditions. Never the less , weather permitting, I will be out at Sir Winston Churchill Park almost daily running the Kite Lab , so folks will be able to catch Against the Wind in some form or another.

wind coil sound flow in Montreal!

I'm just getting ready to head out to Montreal to install my new work at articule in conjunction with the Elektra festival. I'm pretty excited as this is a brand new work. It's a result of 5 years and ongoing research on kite based sound instruments. Another really great part of this project is the support and help from my friends Darcy Bunio and Stephen Hanson. Stephen gave me a bunch of salvaged piano wire to play with. And Darcy , an accomplished luthier, built some custom resonators for the project.



prototype documentation from the Art's Birthday presentation on January 17 2009 here.

Kite Lab documentation here.

resource documentation here.

Here's a sound example from the prototype run through wind coil sound flow

Here's the official blurb.

title: wind coil sound flow
descripton: electro-mechanical sound installation

For his exhibition at articule, Ken Gregory will build an acoustic electro-mechanical system that poetically reproduces the processes involved in operating an Aeolian Kite Instrument in the field, a wind instrument based on an Aeolian harp. The kite's towline is acoustically coupled to a resonator. The resonator amplifies the wind induced vibrations of the towline and resonates harmonically. A large one stringed guitar played by the wind. Receiving the audio recordings from this outdoor instrument, his electro-magnetic sculpture in the gallery not only becomes a poetic and kinetic representation of a sound speaker, but also mirrors the different components of the Aeolian Kite Instrument used to capture the wind’s voice.