“Made In Taiwan” invites people to play with a complex mechanical sound orchestra, installed in the museum by using their mobile phones. The students have made a mechanical orchestra consists of modified, hacked, changed and customised, electronic household devices like vacuum cleaners playing flute, organ and brass, rattling kitchen mixers, buzzing ventilators, and humming refrigerators. In order to wake up the installation and start the orchestra, passers-by dial a telephone number. The call opens the door of the fridge, revealing a “mobile-phone robot person”. When they start pressing the buttons, the various modified household appliances come to live and begin to make a noise: the funny electrical music of recycled everyday objects. The main interest of the Staalplaat workshop is to involve passers-by in such a process of interaction and communication. Their method for achieving this is turning normal simple things around and upside down, by changing their function, by radical recontextualization and reconfiguration. Always with a lot of humour, in order to make ensure enjoyment for the audience.
The Yokomono-installation is built from around two hundred radios. As each killer will play its own record – each one is locked groove record made by Staalplaat for the installation – it opens up a separate audio stream. It thereby generates and controls a multi-channel sound system. By arranging the radios in groups it becomes possible to explore the architectural dimensions of the space. Some radios are tuned to the same frequency, and here Staalplaat uses small battery operated radios on sets of the train models to map the transmission in the space, for it will drive through the interfering frequencies.
The Yokomono set-up in the MOCA is a combinationof the live concert version and the installation version, it will be played live by members of Staalplaat Soundsystem.
