Simply to Bang a Drum
Simply To Bang a Drum was an exhibition by Angus Hamilton James and Finley Highton shown in April of 2024 in the Reid Building at the Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition consisted of a single, collaborative artwork, constructed as a sculptural installation/performance, which produced an ongoing archive of the exhibition as time progressed.
At the centre of this system was a pen plotter (also referred to as a CNC machine), which sat atop two chairs. Below this was an upturned bass drum, which would have small sheets of paper taped to it, which were then used to draw on by the plotter. The mechanical sounds of the pen plotter and the striking of the base drum was picked up by a contact mic inside the drum, which was fed into an oscilloscope. The oscilloscope visualised this noise, alongside the reverberations of the space, into a sound wave. The display of the oscilloscope was configured so that it would display the wave moving from left to right, only ever showing a 2 second window of sound. The Oscilloscope stood on a plinth facing parallel to the plotter and drum, and was faced by 3 cameras which stood in a line. Each camera focused only on the screen of the camera in front of it, and each was set on automatic settings. These cameras fed into a macbook on a second plinth, which was wired to the pen plotter. Every 8 minutes, myself and Finley would sync the production of the next pen plot and the release of a thermal print from the oscilloscope. To do this, we would stand on alternate sides of the system and count down from 3, screenshotting the computer screen of the macbook and pressing print on the oscilloscope at the same time, though sometimes more in sync than other times.
This thermal print would be stuck on the wall, and once the pen plotter was finished with its drawing the drawing would be taken and stuck alongside it, at which point the next drawing would begin. Purely by coincidence, the spacing of our hanging meant that these prints looped around the wall exactly 1 time by the end of the exhibition, and the pen in the pen plotter ran out of ink on the final few prints.
‘Simply To Bang a Drum’ is the exhibition that ‘1 Path with 2 Degrees of Separation’ is based on, for more information see Chapter 1: ‘Transfer’.