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A Machine Winds On (Year After Year), Audio Work and A2 Print, 2008

A Machine Winds On (Year After Year) was commissioned by E:vent for the Sound Proof exhibition and informed by a tour of the East London Olympic Site in construction. Struck by the mechanical nature of both the tour itself and the ceaseless cycle of the manufacturing of the Olympics (there is constantly a city in the process of creating a venue for the Olympics), the work turns the Olympic logo into a series of cogs, each cog driving the next, creating a sonic template (represented in the map, above). The voice of poet Gerry Mitchell speaks in rhyme and tells of the mechanical labours of man and the anthropomorphic activities of machines at the Olympic site and mythologizes their actions within the greater machine that is the Olympics itself. The story ends, and instantly the work sends the listener into a curiosity shop of ticks and tocks, chimes and bells, cranks and whistles, transporting them into the workings of an antiquated clockwork mechanism.

 

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