MPa Sound System: Discs in Tokyo
Sound, in most performance contexts, moves in one direction. It leaves the speaker and arrives at you. What MPa Sound System: Discs does is alter that geometry.
At CON Gallery in Tokyo, Mincheol Seo has built a structure in which the audience does not occupy the periphery of a performance, it occupies the circuit. A central MPa Disc sits on the floor. VQ sits on the disc. Sound generated from his iPhone moves through built-in speakers into the floor, then radiates outward along lines that connect to smaller discs, which connect in turn to the cushions where people sit. To be in the room is to be inside the transmission.
““The freedom and independent spatial quality provided by the platform can also deliver a sense of stability, which may ultimately connect to positive emotions.””
VQ's instrument of choice is worth pausing on. The iPhone is not a neutral object, but it is a normalized one, something carried everywhere, used constantly, rarely regarded as a site of creative possibility. What VQ does is restore that regard. He treats it as what it can be rather than what it typically is. Seo recognizes in this a sensibility close to his own: utility wear reconsidered, familiar forms made legible again through different use.
““Until now, many standards surrounding sound performance have focused on research and refinement based on sound itself. However, in the end, the essence lies in the emotions experienced by the audience.””
The first MPa Sound System performance happened in Seoul, via Zoom. The audio was objectively poor. The latency was real. And yet the piece worked, not despite those qualities, but through them. Imperfection, distance, and the particular atmosphere of a platform not designed for performance produced something a refined speaker system could not. Seo does not believe there is only one correct form for sound to take.
Discs extends that position into material terms. The T-shirts made alongside the performance use zippers, IDEAL, YKK waterproof, nylon, selected for the sounds they generate when operated. Children do this instinctively: pulling a zipper back and forth, less to open or close something than to hear what it does. The gesture reframes function. So does the disc. So does the iPhone. The project is consistent in that way: it keeps asking what familiar things are capable of when the assumption of their use is temporarily set aside.
A structure for generating and distributing sound through MPa Discs.
Disc Design / Creative Direction
Mincheol Seo @seo.mincheol
Live Sound
VQ (Voboku) @voboku
Art Direction / Production / Location / Casting
Sunmin Yuk @sunminyuk
Text / Art Direction
Juyoung Lee @thebroken1999
Words by Donald Gjoka
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