the megaphone project

FINA Cultural Festival

March 2007, Melbourne

First outing of the full scale megaphone project.

Attendants: Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, Jesse Stevens, Sally Smith, David Wells.

This was the first full scale performance of the work. We installed along Birrarung Marr, under large trees and alongside the Yarra River, creating an avenue frame.
We slung a megaphone for three weeks in the Atrium at Federation Square, which played stories and interviews recorded with swimmers from the Victorian Institute of Sport, and imaginary characters.

Over the major performance weekend, we worked with a group of performance students from Swinburne University, to create a group of attendants who played with the passerbys to the installation. APA estimated a crowd of 5,000 attended.

We had great support from ArtPlay, and Federation Square, and Arts Projects Australia to get the full scale installation off the ground. BK group staff member, Gordon Galbraith, who spun the megaphones, came down with his family to the site to visit, as did Jim Sosnin, who helped us crack telephone sets which were in the bases of most megaphones.

Some highlights for us included realising how people of all ages immediately had a physical and acoustic response to the shape of the objects we had made, and also that the recording mechanisms/filters were working as we had hoped as evidenced by someone asking us if we had APRA rights for songs, that were being played by bands across the hill, and recorded and played back in the system!