Scotland Can Make It! is an exhibition of souvenir prototypes inspired by the London 2012 Olympic Games and the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. It features six prototypes created by Scottish artists collaborating with Scottish manufacturers.

Rather than producing a physical souvenir we’re making a virtual one – an app for the iPhone that will be like an audio-visual postcard of Glasgow. When you open the app you will see an image and hear some music. Exactly what you see and hear will be determined by where you are in the world and by which direction you are traveling in relation to Glasgow, more specifically the Commonwealth Sports Arena in the east end of Glasgow. While the app is running the music and pictures will change depending on whether you are moving towards or away from the city. If you are moving in the direction of Glasgow the music and visuals will become richer and more complex and if you are moving away they will they will become more minimal and abstract. In order to experience the most complete version of the music and pictures the user will have to be standing in the Commonwealth Sports Arena. In effect our souvenir actively encourages you back to the place that it commemorates.

Our souvenir app is called Great Circle after the ‘great-circle distance’ method that we are using to calculate the user’s distance from Glasgow. It is a digital software application that doesn’t require any physical manufacture. Instead we are collaborating with Chemikal Underground who will act as the publisher for our app in the Apple App Store.

The app fits into a larger theme that FOUND are currently investigating: the music industry’s obsession with a definitive version of a piece of music. We are interested in exploring new ways of adding value to music and distributing it in formats that cannot easily be pirated. Our Great Circle app will provide a unique experience for each individual user every single time it is played.

A New Interactive Sound Installation by FOUND and Aidan Moffat

www.unravelproject.com

#UNRAVEL opens to the public on 20 April – 7 May as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art at Arch 24/ SWG3.

#UNRAVEL is a collection of devices making up a gallery-based, reactive sound installation, through which the audience will attempt to unravel the truth about The Narrator’s life by playing records from his collection.

When we tell the story of a memory, how much of it is true and how much is shaped by who we are talking to? Once we’ve told the story many times, how do we even know what is true any more – what is constructed and what actually happened?

The installation is the work of Edinburgh based arts collective / experimental pop band FOUND, whose members include Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman and Glasgow-based author and musician, Aidan Moffat best known as one half of the band Arab Strap. FOUND and Aidan Moffat are signed to Glasgow record label Chemikal Underground.

At the heart of the installation is a vinyl record player and ten 7” records of familiar singles from pop music’s heyday. Visitors to the gallery are encouraged to select a record from the collection to be played. As soon as they drop the needle on to the record the installation springs to life. The vinyl controls a series of acoustic, self-playing musical instruments positioned throughout the gallery which soundtrack the story as the narrator recounts a memory he associates with that record. Each 7” record represents a different memory, but unlike conventional vinyl recordings they sound different each time they are played.

Just as a real narrator alters the way they tell a story depending on their mood, audience and context, the memories embodied in the installation will distort, evolve and warp depending on external influences: the time of day, the size of #UNRAVEL’s audience, the local weather, and what people are writing about the installation on twitter from moment to moment.

A year in the making, #UNRAVEL is the first collaboration between FOUND and Aidan Moffat and represents a major new body of work for both. The project required Aidan to write 10 short stories with multiple variations of each, to be soundtracked by a total of 160 new musical compositions by FOUND.

With Investment from Creative Scotland’s Vital Spark programme and New Media Scotland‘s Alt-w Fund with the support of the Centre for Design Informatics, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, SWG3 and the University of Edinburgh.

A composition for plants, yangqin, bamboo robot and robotic chimes, Three Pieces is designed as a collaboration between robots, traditional instruments, and living things, housed in Victorian Palm House of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. A traditional Chinese dulcimer is played by a robot with many bamboo fingers while the surrounding foliage hides an ensemble of robotic chimes. Despite being separate individuals, the robots communicate and perform together. The robot performers are conducted by all the living things in the Palm House. The moisture content of the soil changes slowly as the plants absorb water, while on a much faster timescale, the temperature changes in the building as animals, including humans, move about. The installation detects this living presence in the Palm House and the music changes accordingly. The robots react to humans, but their mood alters with the plants.

FOUND were commissioned by Edinburgh’s Hogmanay to design a mass participation game for their first ever New Year Games which took place in and around Edinburgh’s Old Town on 1 January 2012. Situated in The Hub on Castlehill, our game was called Throw Things at FOUND and involved people throwing paper aeroplanes from a balcony at three instruments on stage. The object of the game was to activate all three instruments at once to trigger the chorus of the current song and move the game on to the next song. Players had fifteen minutes to try and complete all five songs.

thenewyeargames.com/the-games

When asked by Chemikal Underground to release a single to promote their album factorycraft, FOUND decided that it made perfect sense to ask a confectioners to manufacture the records rather than a vinyl pressing plant.  They collaborated with Fisher & Donaldson of Fife to create the worlds first playable & edible chocolate 7″ single. Fisher & Donaldson produced 50 copies of the chocolate record, which have sadly all sold out. You can still buy the digital version from Chemikal here, although it doesn’t taste nearly as good.

The chocolate single was played on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6music show, although it had half melted in the London summer heat.

Our sound installation, End of Forgetting, was shown as part of the Material Rites group exhibition at the Royal Society of British Sculptors, London from 13 January – 11 February 2011. From 18 – 31 March 2011 the exhibition toured to Inspace, Edinburgh.

The installation remembers every sound it hears. These can be accessed by turning the wheel. Over time, its memories become confused. Every few minutes, the installation plays a brief snippet of the latest audio uploaded by anyone onto the internet at that moment. These are added to its memories. You can also eavesdrop on its memories as it reposts them online through it’s twitter feed.

Download the catalogue here.

End of Forgetting was funded by an Alt-W research and development award with support from the University of Edinburgh.

Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.

Cybraphon is funded by the Alt-w Production Award administered by New Media Scotland. In November 2009 Cybraphon won a Scottish BAFTA in the Best Interactive category.

www.cybraphon.com

FOUND were commissioned by the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in 2007 to build an ambitious interactive audio installation for the Edinburgh Festival. Full details of the Etiquette installation can be found on the project website.

The installation consisted of a table on which various boxes could be placed an moved around by members of the public. The choice of blocks and their location would determine music being played within a quadraphonic sound space. All the elements of the music that the table produced were recorded in the sculpture workshop and its grounds including some of the sounds of the table itself being constructed as well as ongoing work by other artists in the workshop.

In this video, Ziggy plays the table. Throughout the day, the “mood” of the table changes and along with it the types of sounds, music and tempo it plays. Here it is being quite relaxed… A free EP of music from the Etiquette project is available.

Visit the project’s own website here.