Dan Hall (MFA ’12)

This Is Your Song: Elective Guitar Suite, 2012 electric guitars, motors, microcontroller, wood, steel, speakers

“I am interested in conceptual, physical, and aesthetic engagement within the social scenes that comprise our hyperreal culture. Through my sculptural objects and installations, I am continually looking for ways to generate conversations and experiences between members of a community, experiences which will allow them to expand their ideas of public space, participation, and the potential of shared experiences occurring outside the bounds of our marketplace society. To that end, This Is Your Song is a body of work that aims to synthesize these ideas through the transformation of leftover consumer goods and new media technologies into novel musical assemblages with which viewers are encouraged to play, assemblages that facilitate the creation of impromptu and transient
auditory experiences.

By employing and reconfiguring these secondhand instruments in conjunction with the new media strategies of the open source movement, I effectively mix the old and the new, and create a space for temporary and ephemeral musical and social interactions that are open and unique in each instance, allowing for a different sort of language to emerge between participants. These works also
point to subtle analogies concerning the ways in which technological progress has altered our tactile relationship with the world.”