mixer//shredder [2020]
The MIXER//SHREDDER method was developed in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic by Lee Triming, a tutor at The Ruskin School of Art; everyone within the art school - tutors and students - were invited to take part in online MIXER//SHREDDER sessions. Quickly the MIXER//SHREDDER sessions became completely student - led, and developed into an online safe space which addressed the art - school pressures, as well as personal and pandemic worries.
The MIXER//SHREDDER method was to start a video chat, create a list of the attendees in the chat box and choose four or five images from our personal mobile phone camera rolls. The attendees would then start an email or messaging chain: sending their images to the next person in the list for them to edit as they pleased using Photoshop or any other editing software. After one or two hours, your images would return to you vaguely familiar but essentially ‘baked’, after passing through the editing process of several other artists.
Over time, MIXER//SHREDDER attendees noticed that although we often worked together in ‘silence’, there were several sounds, sights and feelings which often accompanied our image baking sessions. The method accommodated our shared frustrations, creativity - block, boredom, cravings and ideas. It became a way to process world events, like the death of George Floyd in the USA and Sarah Everard in London, UK. It became a way to cope with loneliness and to listen to one another. The sounds of typing and clicking, our yawns distorted over a bad internet connection, a family dog barking, or our conversations often became too tempting not to reference and remember.
Four second - year students [Alice Hackney, Ananda Kupfer, Sarah Catterall and Sophia Hambleton-Grey] decided to test the MIXER//SHREDDER method using four personal sound recordings instead of images. Every week for a month, we sent the next person in the email chain an edit of the sampled sound recordings as well as the original samples. Eventually we amalgamated the final four soundscapes into one larger soundscape. This body of work was an EMPRES [Electronic Music Practice RESearch] Award 2020 finalist and was exhibited online at The Art of Noises V[irtual] exhibition in 2020 in affiliation with Modern Art Oxford.
