Hans Peter Kuhn- Competition

Student Competition:
In collaboration with ‘A Sound and Light Transit’, a major public art commission for Leeds with artist Hans Peter Kuhn and Bauman Lyons Architects.

Background:

Leeds City Council have commissioned a light and sound installation from Hans Peter Kuhn to be sited under the Neville Street railway bridge ‘gateway’ to Leeds. The installation will be an integrated feature of the upgrade and refurbishment of Neville Street, and is part of a larger £4.5 million environmental improvement scheme to upgrade the key southern entrance to Leeds. The project involves agencies and companies from many disciplines – architects, sound engineers, project managers etc. The project has an interpretative programme attached to it through which four students from four institutions in Leeds, the Met, Leeds University, Leeds College of Music and ourselves at LCAD can engage with the city through series of responses specifically around the extended use of sound and it’s physical realisation.

Competition brief:

To enter the competition: fill in the competition form available from the Fine Art office. Deadline is January 18th 2008. A shortlist will be selected by a panel of staff on the basis of coursework submitted at the end of the first semester (January, 2008), with the successful student announced by the end of January. You will also attend the lecture by Hans Peter Kuhn on November 20th in the Studio Lecture Theatre, Blenheim Walk.


The winner of the competition will receive a bursary (around £500), the chance to work with the other students from the partner institutions in a series of seminars and masterclasses with Hans Peter Kuhn, Arup Associates’ SoundLab in London, the Sonic Arts Network and others involved in ‘A Sound and Light Transit’. You will be responding to a commissioning brief that will ask you to outline your aims, research proposal and budget. As well you will be asked to make a proposal for a piece of work to be included in the launch exhibition of the project in October, 2008 at Project Space Leeds (Whitehall Waterfront) with your work realised in a public area in the city.

A Sound and Light Transit:

LED Light wall

‘The east wall of the Neville street tunnel (80m) will be covered with perforated steel panels with sound absorbing material behind them. About every 10 cm vertically and horizontally an acrylic glass piece will be placed into one of the perforation holes. The complete wall is therefore covered with a simple dotted pattern. About 10 % of these acrylic rods will be equipped with white LEDs that are programmable. The programme will allow varying patterns of horizontal and vertical lines of LED light. Every early morning, at a time of least traffic, the pattern will change – chosen by a random
generator – and one will never see the same pattern twice.' The Artist

Sound works

‘The concept for the sound installation is to alter the environment psychologically, as physical possibilities are extremely limited. In addition to the reduction of the sound level through physical interventions such as wall cladding, it is suggested that sounds added to the ambient sound environment will reduce its current aggressiveness. As the traffic noises are not constant but rather changing all the time, a system with noise sensors will be installed and the level of the sounds will be controlled in accordance to the acoustic situation. A specific composition of sounds will be written that has an amount of
randomness involved, so that it will be always changing. The sounds move along the street and fill partly the noise gaps and by thus creates a smoother acoustic.’ The Artist

Links:

http://www.hpkuhn-art.de/
http://2006.biennial.com/content/Programme/ArtistDirectory/article_35_16.aspx
http://sonambiente.net/en/04_artists/4M2kuh_werk.html
http://www.arup.com/acoustics/whatwedo.cfm?pageid=4725