Alberto Garutti is one of the most important artists on the Italian contemporary art scene
ITALY Everybody’s talking
JoeCo’s BlackBox is recording visitors’ comments at an important art exhibition in Milan. Mike Clark paints a picture of the technology
CAPTION IS the first retrospective exhibition by Alberto Garutti, one of the most important and eclectic artists on the Italian contemporary scene. Garutti decided to give the exhibition, which occupies all three floors of Milan’s Pavilion of Contemporary Art, an original slant, by having a series of microphones installed to record visitors’ comments for inclusion in a book after the event.
Particularly well known for
his public works, Garutti’s art ranges from paintings and sculptures to photographs, videos and architectural designs and has been exhibited in Belgium, Germany, Japan, the US and Russia, as well as in numerous Italian museums. One original permanent public project is a series of concrete benches in the town of Trivero, each with a sculpture of one or two of the local population’s pet
dogs sitting or lying on it. Another work, Che cosa succede nelle stanze quando gli uomini se ne vanno? (What happens in rooms when everybody leaves?), consists of a group of apparently anonymous wooden tables and chairs, which, when the room is in darkness, light up thanks to their brightly coloured phosphorous paint. For Caption, Andrea Taglia (tenor Andrea Bocelli’s sound designer and FOH engineer)
transformed Garutti’s idea into an audio project, preparing all the specs for the general AV contractor, Milan’s Besio Sound. Francesco Penolazzi, founder of Maestranze Artistiche, the company that supplied Besio with the microphones for the project, explains: “There were 24 Sennheiser MKH 816 and four Sennheiser MKH 416 suspended from the ceiling using custom aluminium tubes containing the cables and fitted with our custom adaptors. As well as being tuchel- to-XLR adapters, these also transform 48V phantom power to vintage 12V T-power. The cable runs to the 32-input Midas Verona console were installed out of site above the false ceiling. “As far as mic placement was concerned,” Taglia adds, “visitor traffic at this type of event is normally a few dozen people per day, making fleeting comments, rather than a babbling crowd. At the drawing board stage, my mic layout aimed at covering the areas in which talk was most probable, without worrying about the risk of interference between several people talking simultaneously while looking at the varied works on show by this truly eclectic artist: photographs, paintings, sculptures, videos and architectural designs.” Regarding the choice of
JoeCo’s BlackBox BBR1B Recorder to gather the visitors’ comments, Penolazzi concludes: “The key feature of the BlackBox is that it records high- quality WAV files on external storage media – which can be simple USB2 or USB Flash Drive drives. For a job like this, with long recording times and
numerous tracks, it was of fundamental importance to be able to use media that were easily available and replaced and had great capacity, recording eight hours a day for about 90 days. It was also important that the system could be switched on and off by a person with no technical experience, without any complicated start-up and