Office HertZ

1998

sound art

Sitting in their 10x 10 office,where they have worked everyday together for seven years, Mike Steventon and Myfanwy Ashmore click away, their bodies back to back. The drone of the servers, workstations, hubs, grinding of the floppy drives, whirring of fans, and the invisible busy currents are working away inside the boxes, passing voltage back and forth, communicating abstractly to the components inside. At some point in the monotony of day to day tasks, Mike and Myfanwy, noticed a subtle sound emanating from their office ghetto blaster. Quite excited about this new found anomaly they discovered they could manipulate it with the electronic devices in their office that were also emanating frequencies that went otherwise unheard.

As their bodies interfere with, and conduct electromagnetic fields, the discharging of the computer monitors, functioning like massive capacitors, and the hundreds of capacitors in the office computers, generate electronic disturbances normally not audible beyond the hum of a hard drive. Like invisible entities and messages travelling around, these waves flow through our spaces, through our days while we work away mostly oblivious to them. They turned up the volume, started messing with the machines, and Office Hertz emerged.

Office Hertz amplifies the ultra sonic office experience. Office Hertz is a collaborative sound performance whereby Mike Steventon and Myfanwy Ashmore engage with office technology and the invisible, yet audible electromagnetic waves emanating from within these everyday machines. Mike and Myfanwy have condensed this process into a 10 minute performance & composition.

side 1: 30 minutes -- 70 megs large file

side 2: 30 minutes -- 70 megs large file