vibrating coffee cups with mocha tone generator, 2009

This is a piece I made for the "Past Presence" show at Redux on view through August 16. It is an encapsulation of a couple of ideas I have been playing with over the years. One of the main ingredients is the image of a vibrating coffee cup. I have always liked the feeling of a coffee cup vibrating and moving under it's own engine. in earlier versions I just put battery powered vibrators or homemade motors inside coffee cups and set them loose. In order to refine the piece for an installation I thought about how I wanted to experience these portable consumer fetish objects in a gallery setting. Along this line of thinking I began to imagine the sound that these cups would make if placed upon a series of minimalist style sculptures. That evolved into a mixture of found objects, pristine steel shelves and a simple plywood cube built on a human scale.

To enhance the relationship of the portable consumer fetish to that of the viewer the vibrating coffee cups are motion activated, triggered by conventional security light motion detectors. This sets up a quite literal relationship where the viewer "turns on" the vibrating coffee cups, reversing the usual relationship of the fetish to the consumer. The final component is the audio. The cups create a sort of off kilter drumming/meditation cycle. The noise is focused through a conventional bass guitar amp which creates an overall system of meditative white noise, that I hope intensifies the spiritual nature of the installation. i used a series of homemade contact microphones, to amplify the noise of the vibrating coffee cups

The piece is of course just plain fun and enjoys a relationship with previous coffee-cup-centric work viewable here
http://www.jonathanbrilliant.com/coffee_cups/index.html

and a full gallery of images with an explanation of this piece is viewable here

http://www.jonathanbrilliant.com/vibrating.html

for my next trick I will pull a stir stick installation oout of my suitcase when I land in Norman Oklahoma on August 18 for the second stop of my "Have sticks will travel tour". speaking of upcoming exhibitions I have printed a small run of the tour poster designed by slowe

buy now for 10$ shipping included, plus a special gift

There will be some available for purchase at the city gallery on Saturday during the closing reception for a reduced price. The rest are available online, and at each subsequent venue I am creating work for through 2010. I made one of those google checkout buttons, if you click it you should be charged $10 which includes shipping and a "special gift" these are archival inkjet prints on nice poster stock paper.
Along the way I hope to get some t-shirts, buttons, and other ephemera created, but more than likely i will revisit this apsect in January as I now need to focus my energy on creating and planning the work.