Speaking Balls

Sphere collection - FreeState

We’ve always been fascinated by spheres. And not just FreeState. You, the world, all humans.

Yes. The sky is full of balls. The Greeks explained the universe by means of celestial balls. Christian and Muslim medieval theologists posited that the planets and stars were moved by ball-conscious angels. Even today – despite the Copernican revolution – we happily think of the galaxy’s objects as pinned to a vast sphere.

Basically, we like spheres. They speak to us. The globe is a sphere, which is why kings liked them, and popes, and lords, and pretty much anyone interested in taking over the world. The apple is a sphere, and it speaks about loss, redemption, fertility, life, love, purity, desire, rebirth and beauty, which is why kings liked them, and popes, and lords, and…  For a long time the sphere spoke the language of absolutism, of religion, its purpose political, its story found in coats of arms, heraldic insignia and in the decorative elements of both renaissance and baroque architecture.

However, while nearly always saying something, spheres were never – to exhaust the metaphor – keynote speakers. The big cheeses – the triangle (cross) , the crescent (sickle, moon) the circle (sun, wreath, crown) – were always considered more meaningful, more potent, more relevant, and the sphere, relegated even in the case of portraiture to cameo roles, was frequently forced to fight its corner against a treasury of rivals, against pearls, sceptares, diamonds etc. This is certainly most true of architecture, whatever the success of the dome.

Chaux cemetry sphere - Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

And even when finally – with the French Revolution, with in particular the visionary designs of the likes of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée – when finally it takes centre stage, and comes to symbolise by itself the people, the nation, the body nationale, the sphere as metaphor is so much less well behaved than its competitors, its vague and varied antiquarian stories easily hijacked. In 1939, for example, at New York’s World Fair, and in the designs of Albert Speer, Germany’s leading architect, it spoke for futurism and fascism – at exactly the same time.

In the end, the very geometry of its form – total, self-referential, anti-gravitational – makes its own meaning, which in many ways is what happened to our own sphere, the Glitterball. Predictably, the initial attraction of suspending an enormous sphere outside the entrance to Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class Wing at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 is heavy with Old World speak: Virgin is a global brand; it flies around the world; ergo, a giant ball signifying planetary reach. No one could have foreseen, however, its effect upon arrival, its own physical power. Brought in, across one of the runways, it appeared in the distance inconsequential, small. We were – initially – nonplussed, unengaged. It looked like a child’s toy, and it was only up close – craned in over the roof, and readied for suspension – that we were able to gauge its actual size, to feel its hugeness. Now a giant, and yet still emanating a kind of unbridled childishness, it made us smile, laugh – all of us, client included. Ever changing, its moiré affect illusory, compelling, fascinating, it felt irreverent, playful, fun. Like a glitter ball, in fact.

construction drawing of the Glitterball for Virgin Atlantic

Making Giants – again

If you’ve read our post on the same subject, you’ll want to know (perhaps) why one of Britain’s best known giants, Andrew Gormley’s Angel of the North, didn’t get a mention. Short answer? We’re not sure. Sorry. Here it is:

Angel of the North – steel – height: 20m – 300 tonnes

Situated in Gateshead, clearly visible from the A1, and designed, built and erected between 1994 and 1998, the Angel of the North is, for more reasons than one, a very modern giant. Funded largely by the National Lottery, made of COR-TEN, a steel alloy, it cost close to £1 million, is located in an area originally earmarked for regeneration, and initially met with stern opposition. It was described variously as a ‘monumental clanger’ (The Sun), ‘a clothes peg and a foot rule’ (The Mail) and ‘vulgar’ (Brian Sewell, for The Evening Standard). Giants, if nothing else, attract a lot of attention.

Dream

Today, the Angel of the North is a landmark work of public art. We love it. As important an icon of the northeast as the Tyne Bridge, it’s served to whet a collective appetite for giant sculptures, an appetite that has resulted in – most notably – Jaume Plensa’s Dream (St Helens), in Thomas Heatherwick’s B of the Bang (Manchester) and in Wolfgang Buttress’s Rise (south Belfast).

Like the Angel of the North, each of these giants involves enormous amounts of time and planning; each employs industrial scale making techniques; and each serves a public space. However, there’s more here than meets the eye. All, even Dream, the recipient of almost universal praise, has faced giant problems: Rise is actually a replacement for an initial commission, a larger work, Trillian, considered too costly; B of the Bang, the largest of the lot, suffered structural problems and was subsequently dismantled; and Gormley, while successful in getting the Angel of the North made, had previously failed to get his Brick Man off the ground.

Truth be told, making giants is not easy business. They’re expensive. They’re big. They’re next door. They make mincemeat of time frames. The competition is super fierce, and for every successful venture, there are x number of projects that never make it beyond the drawing board – the GatewayWales landmark initiative, for example, or Mark Wallinger’s White Horse.

White Horse - artists model - proposed height: 50m

Giant making requires buckets of faith – in groups, politics, local democracy, yes, but also in science and art. Structural engineer Cecil Balmond calls it ‘the crucible of invention.’ Every successful (read made) giant pushes at the envelope: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas (Tate Modern) uses a fabric that is just 1mm thick; Dream is self-cleaning (titanium dioxide); Dune Grasses (Blackpool), our most recent giant, employs the technical excellence of Altelier One to kinetically mimic windblown grass.

And, as if this were not enough (it’s not), the best of giants speak – to us, the land, with other giants. Really? Yup. Imagine – if you will – beetling up the A1 and coming across the poised and sun-blasted brilliance of the Angel of the North. Look at its wings. Big, yes, but look at their angle. Set to embrace, grab or sweep away, they’re saying something, telling a story, yours, ours, anyone’s. Good giants tell good stories. They do. Worth their weight in gol…

Dune Grasses

The Garden of Forked Paths

Stowe Gardens - © 2011 Agatch Lucka-Ahmen

In his story The Garden of Forked Paths, Jorge Luis Borges, arguably Argentina’s greatest writer, is not concerned directly with a garden, but rather with what he calls a combination novel, a hypertext novel, a story that can be read on many different levels, from many different perspectives, and by many different people. However, had Borges had the opportunity to visit Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire, then he would, we’re certain, have jettisoned from his story plan the garden-as-metaphor conceit, for here, in 300 acres of rolling fields, serpentine waterways, groves, temples, hermitages, ruins and grottos, lies the real thing: the hypertext garden, the garden of forked paths. It is also one of the main inspirations for much of FreeState’s work.

Huh? Bear with us. Stowe Gardens, a leading example of the eighteenth century’s English garden movement, is the brain child of Richard Temple, leading Whig and distinguished soldier. The year is 1715. His unremitting support for King George 1^st is beginning to reap much reward. Last year, following George’s coronation, he was made Baron of Cobham. This year he marries Anne Halsey, heiress to mountains of untold wealth. Next year he’ll be made Privy Councillor, and in three year’s time he will have the Viscounty of Cobham tucked firmly under his belt. A rising star, a member of the exclusive Kit Cat Club, friends with the likes of Alexander Pope and architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham has the world at his feet. What next week, for a man like this?

Well, two things. First, more power, please, and lots of it, gained either directly, through office, or by means of patronage – though in this he will be forever frustrated by Sir Robert Walpole, First Lord of the Treasury, Great Britain’s first prime minister, onetime friend, confidant and political colleague. Second, build something. Build something lasting, something that says important things about about him, his friends and their shared view of how the world should be. Something, above all, about Britain, British taste, her technologies, her artistic prowess. So, not French, not Catholic, not kingly, not absolutist.  It must, in the words of Jonathan Meades, be progressive, worldly, liberal, enlightened, secular, parliamentarian and, crucially, sybaritic. It must, in short, be the Whig worldwide view, a physical manifesto, a blustery polemic in 3D. What better place than to write it on Stowe Gardens?

Jonathan Meades - on set of Reading A Garden

Thus is it that, from 1715, having bought his cousins out, and pioneering a very English philosophy of what it is that constitutes a so-called properly landscaped park, Cobham makes a garden speak the politics of the new aristocracy. Its many builds will employ the brilliance of Vanbrugh, the baroque tendencies of John Gibbs and the accessorising eye of William Kent. Meanwhile, its shape – its irregularities, the many perspectives, the ha ha’s (sunken fences), the hermitages, the hideaways, the walks, the untended fields, the clumps of trees, the seemingly randomly placed deadwoods, the sheer lack of Frenchness – it will owe to first the designs of Charles Bridgewater, then to the naturalistic Kent and, finally, to the singular genius of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, in whom the English garden found its true poet.

Unlike Versailles, its opposite, it will make nothing of its house, which is dull, a dull, inert block. Instead, it will be about itself and its makers, modern, forward looking, a garden that cannot be seen in its totality from any single point, a garden that is asymmetrical, filled with hidden delights, the unexpected, a garden of jokes, secrets, ideas. And because it is, so it will issue a guide, the first of its kind, a map that not only shows the way, but also names and explains, a kind of literary appendage designed to help visitors – who will come in their thousands – negotiate a garden that speaks a language steeped in the classics, in myths and monsters, in ancient history, in lost symbols, and in the whys and wherefores of British aristocratic life.

Which is exactly what happened. Stowe Park, a story filled with stories, is, says Meades, ‘an anthology of boasts.’  Take, for example, the temples of Ancient Virtues, British Worthies and Modern Virtues. Set in the Elysian Fields, reflected in the waters of the River Styx, they are Cobham’s version of the good, the great and the downright bad: old heroes in the first, modern heroes in the second and everything that is rubbish about eighteenth century today signifed by the ruins of the third, and by a headless statue of none other than his arch enemy, Walpole. It is a big old Whig boast, and hilariously obvious. Obvious, that is, if you’re a member of the Kit Cat Club , or someone with enough of a reading in the classics, in British history, in Cobhams Machiovelian shenanigons.  Otherwise, like most of us, you’ll be needing that there guide book.

from British Worthies to Temple of Ancient Virtue

And it gets even more interesting. Stowe was developed and changed over time. The many effects of the story’s main features are dependent on when you visit. The strength of its message is, from an early eighteenth century perspective, somewhat diluted by the removal of the Temple of Modern Virtue in the 1770s, its fragmented remains only identified 200 odd years later, in a survey carried out by the National Trust in 1989. That’s up to a thirds worth of story, gone, its meaning – for a large chunk of time – changed. More, the story is, whatever the effects of the vagaries of time, not nearly as clear as Cobham would have hoped.  The inclusion, for example, of Sir Walter Raleigh, pirate and general wastrel,  makes for an interesting twist, his very unworthiness casting a questioning shadow across the rest, across Shakespeare, Newton, Milton etcetera. And not just the Elysian Fields. This warping, twisting and proliferation of meaning is everywhere at Stowe. 300 acres of invention, of rampant metaphor, of adverts, games, nods, winks and landscaped illusion, it is a garden ‘about which,’ in the end, says Meades, ‘there is no consensus about meaning.’

Which brings us – by way of a rather long forking back path, if you’re still here – to the hypertextual realities of Borges, to FreeState, to how Stowe Gardens continues to inform almost everything we do. This is most obviously true of our work on the Sony IFA stands, but is perhaps much better illustrated by The Agency of Change, a smaller project, commissioned by Nokia. Using sound and lighting to transform – and continually transform – Beaumont Chapel, in Windsor, and led by a group of professional actors, we placed 200 of Nokia’s senior directors at the centre of a multi-sensory experience, one which had them digitally and instantly feeding back their impressions to their colleagues. Sensual, interactive, a story made up of stories, the total immersion… the similarities with our reading of Stowe are obvious: interesting visuals, believable props, great sounds, tightly choreographed spaces, the subjects as much agents of experience as the object – and the opportunity for endlessly expressive outcomes. And all from a garden, eh.

Bridgeman's Map of Stowe

Here’s Looking at Billions

What’s 10 000 people look like? 100 000? What about a million? The largest gathering of people ever – anywhere – took place in 2007, at the Kumbh Mela, on the Ganges, in northern India. One of Hinduism’s most important festivals, it attracted 70 000,000 pilgrims over the course of 45 days. The only way to see a number like this is from space. And not very well.

And if that’s hard, what about a billion plus? The world’s population is 7 000 000 000 000 people. It’s impossible to imagine this many people – let alone see them. And what about even higher numbers, numbers used to account for the world’s insects, its grains of sand or, the subject of this week’s window, it’s many monies?

In his blog Information is Beautiful, David McCandless expresses his frustration at the (unreflective) ease with which the media reports large amounts of money: ‘They’re reported as self-evident facts, when, in fact, they’re mind-boggling and near incomprehensible without context.’ Decontextualised, the information given is next to useless.

Better, then, to provide a visual and relative context with which to understand ‘unseeable’ numbers. Something, then, like this. Simple, easy; information made beautiful. Example: it costs nearly as much to defend America as it does to feed every child on earth for 5 years. You can do something with this.

The Billion-Dollar-O-Gram by David McCandless

Making Giants

The Dance of Albion by William Blake

We’re big fans of giants. Adam and Charlotte’s eldest is called Albion, after Blake’s prophetic mythology Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion. Albion himself loves Transformer Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, from the planet Cyberton. Office favourites include Jeff Koon’s Puppy, Marc Quinn’s Planet and HON – en Katredal by Niki de Saint Phalle et al.

Actually, not just Freestate. The whole world loves a good giant. They’re everywhere – childrens books, bibles, parks, streets, the entrances to public buildings, in dreams, the sea, the sky, everywhere. Giants are useful human tools. They honour gods, the dead, kings, the great. They pacify the devil, the marauder, the killing machine. They confuse the enemy, protect the village. They’re magical, superhuman, awesome. Roald Dahl’s BFG is a running time machine; the Trojan horse a belly of death; the Colossus of Rhodes a raging bronze sun.

Making big things is what we humans like to do. Indeed, we’d go so far as to say that it’s something of a compulsion, as natural as the need to go fast, the desire to dance. There are many reasons for this, the most obvious being simply wanting to be big ourselves, to defy gravity, to reach up, look out and over ourselves. This want has less to do with certain cultures than it has with the idea of a super-enlarged self, a magical, indestructible being, a projection of the self, an act of the imagination – something universal.

Which is why, whatever the specific reasons for their making, all giants are timeless. Who, for example, can fail to feel something for the massive Buddha of Leshan? Carved into the side of a river cliff, by a monk said to have plucked his eyes out when his enormous project stalled, it’s the world’s largest stone statue. But the back story – religious, particular, rooted in time and space – hardly matters when set against Leshan’s vertiginous massiveness, the sheer power of being a giant. Anyone can feel this. It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from. You just have to be human.

Jeff Koons Puppy © 2011 AnOtherMag.com

Trojan Horse

Which is not to say that giants are meaningless. Quite the opposite. There is a natural and unavoidable anxiety inherent in the act of making a giant: the need to be something else, to transpose the self, to be above human, to cheat death. Giants live for a mighty long time. Some never die. Blake’s Albion sees a giant collapse into selfhood, only to rise up and die the death of Eternal Death. And if size appeases anxiety, then it seems logical to assume that the larger the giant, the less anxious its maker. The maoi (stone heads) of Easter Island, of which there are over 800 known examples, get larger over time, the result of competition between rival clans, all of whom felt that their ancestral lineages would be greatly enhanced by the very hugeness of their stone representations.

The enduring potency of the giant is as evident in its vulnerability as it is in its size. Destroying an enemy’s giant is of greater import – possibly – than destroying its maker: the Easter Islanders toppled each other’s maois, taking care that their faces lay pressed into the earth; in 2001 the Taliban dynamited the giant buddhas of the Hindu Kush, and made the world gasp; images from the recent war in Iraq, which show the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s giant statue, feel somehow more powerful than those depicting his subsequent capture and death.

So, giants continue to fascinate. And grow. And inform. Which brings us back to us, to Freestate, and all our giants. While The Big 4 is our most obvious giant, The Glitterball – which marks the entrance to the Upper Class wing at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 – is a giant too, as is the SpinVox Wishing Well, and in terms of scale all 4 of the Sony IFA stands are types of giants. However, less tangible, but just as important, is the fact that working with giants makes us feel a bit like Sophie, the girl in The BFG: happy, excited, hugely creative.

Quentin Blakes illustration of the BFG

Consider yourself Rickrolled

The things Freestate would never do: one, stick Rick Astley in the office window; two…

Except Rick Astley is more than the blue eyed soulboy turned eighties pop phenomenon turned blue eyed soulman that we all know and love. He is also the subject of the world’s first internet meme.  Internet meme? Allow us to explain. Technically, an internet meme is the process by which the true destination of a hyperlink is hidden from the unsuspecting user, who is thus tricked into clicking through to something entirely unexpected.

A simple and highly effective prank, it was first used in May 2007, when gamers in search of the trailer for Grand Auto Theft IV were sneakily diverted to Rick’s pop video for Never Gonna Give You Up. And so started the roll of what was to become an enormous ball, with a reputed 18 million unsuspecting American users misdirected to Astley’s video.

Nicknamed ‘rickrolling’, internet memes reached epic proportions in 2008 and 2009, and mutated well beyond their hyperlink origins. Videos, hashtags, posters and whole websites added depth to the prankster’s palate, while staged real world rickrolling events were aimed at all and sundry, including, famously, the Church of Scientology, one or two hapless newsreaders and the whole of Liverpool Street Station, surprised host to a mass gathering of Rick Astley lookalikes in April, 2008.

Inevitably, Astley’s homage to eighties pop has risen from the grave. Having sold in the millions in 1987, when it topped the charts for 5 weeks, and earning Astley a Brit Award in 1988, Never Gonna Give You Up’s stock fell throughout the nineties, reaching rock bottom in 2004, when it was voted 28^th in VH1’s list of 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs…Ever. However, pop – like fashion – must eat itself many times, and in 2008 Astley won the MTV award for Best Act Ever, his enormous rickrolling fan base making Never Gonna Give You Up a complete shoo in.

Anyway, the rickrolling phenomenon has spawned a giant industry, with everyone from Stock, Aitkin and Waterman to a well known high street coffee shop to YouTube cashing in, and so was born yet another generation of Rick Astley Never Gonna Give You up t-shirt wearers.

And what’s it like? Rick’s video, we mean. Well, take a look for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch/nevergonna.

Only joking. Here it is, really http://www.youtube.com/watch /nevergonna.

The Rick Astley shop window at FreeState HQ

Viva Lantana

If you happen to be in the middle of town, hungry and scratching about for a caffeine hit, then allow us to flag up the gloriously redemptive powers of Lantana Cafe on Charlotte Place.

A Freestate favourite, owned and run by Australian lawyer turned restaurateur, Shelagh Ryan (plus family), Lantana is divided into two: In for eat-ins, Out for takeaways. A row of tables and chairs stretching down one side, a picnic bench and stools outside, it’s a simple, down-to-earth set up, the main piece of art being a huge blue mural at one of the cafe. We like it a lot.

Lantana’s morning fare is as delicious as it is inventive. Out goes the Full English, the slices of ‘Hovis and jam’; in come the likes of toasted banana bread, whipped blueberry butter, HG Walter’s organic bacon, corn frittas, pork belly, scrambled eggs on sourdough toast and baked eggs with chorizo sausage, roast mushrooms and spicy tomato sauce. Please note: the bacon’s an absolute must.

Equally fine, the lunchtime menu showcases a Melbourne inspired ‘fusion (for want of a better word)’ of Asian and European cuisine, with Udon noodle soup with pork meatballs and shiitake mushrooms sitting cheek to jowl with the likes of steak and sautéed onion sandwiches. For a filler, try the BRAT, a supercharged Aussie speciality.

Of course, if you’re on the run, then Out’s perfect. The window’s full of cakes, it does fruit, trays of salmon and chicken, drinks and is – like the cafe – wallet friendly. Look out for the Crack Cake. Just look out.

With seasonal beans supplied by Square Mile, the coffee’s quite special. Here at Freestate, we’re all very big flat white fans, which, as we know you know, is made with microfoam and a single or double shot of espresso. We like the double shot. It’s good for business.

Out's front window

Lantana’s takeaway is open weekdays 7.30am to 3pm. The cafe shuts later, and is open all week. Shelagh’s blog is well worth a visit. The website’s a homage to digitalised minimalism. See www. scramblingeggs.blogspot.com and www.lantanacafe.co.uk.   

Mother of All Projects

It’s a wrap. Sony IFA 2011, we mean. And no small thanks to Kathleen Gearhart-Filmer, who managed the project from day one.

Kathleen’s background is in organising and managing large scale entertainment shows. Previously with Disney, where first she directed its non-American special events arm, and then its creative entertainment section, she’s since project managed, directed and produced for a number of international entertainment groups, and now works out of London, her clients including the likes of Mercedes, Saatchi & Saatchi and Transport for London.

Kathleen was the executive producer on the Grand Depart of the Tour de France, London 2007

So, definitely the woman for the job – no question. And yet, as she says herself, making the Sony booth was something else, a job requiring enormous powers of creativity, stamina and flexibility. Apart from the sheer complexity of managing a brief that included 1400 products, 2.2 km of lighting truss and 790 plus lighting instruments (linked by over 15 km of mains cable), the project, which began in February, and culminated in September, lasted a total of 6 months – a mighty long time to keep one’s eye on the ball.

Most interesting, however, is the fact that – for the first time since we’ve worked with Sony – our immediate client cluster included Tokyo as well as Europe, a total of 150 Sony directors, creatives and managers. While indicative of the relatively high profile occupied by IFA in the world of consumer electronics, the job of managing a large and geographically disparate client base required the setting up of small but fulltime Freestate – client liaison team. The project’s success is, in part, due to the skill with which Kathleen and the team managed to convert countless ideas, visions, wants and needs into a coherent strategy.

Add to this the number of last minute changes, the putting together of a significant amount’s worth of animation and after effects, and the sheer technical knowhow required for the purpose of installing a digital platform – with 7.5 km of network cable – capable of coordinating complex waves of live happenings, and you have, in effect, the mother of all projects. ‘I should have known what I was letting myself in for…’

And yet, looking back, it is not the complexity of the project that Kathleen chooses to concentrate on. Rather, she cites the joys of working with Freestate, ‘the outstanding contribution’ of the technical director, Nigel O’Hagan; the ‘amazing, detailed and saint(like)’ Dominic Hyman, whose artistic direction ‘made everything come to life’; the team as a whole, ‘the right team, an extraordinary staff.’ Indeed.

Inner Core, Sony stand 2011 - 2011 © James McCauley

Sony stand, 2011 - 2011 © James McCauley

E = mc2

This year’s Sony stand at the 2011 IFA in Berlin aims to show  the converging complexity of the eletronic giant’s content, its cloud of online services and its extraordinary variety of interconnected projects – and to show it in such a way as to be understood immediately, from any point in time or space.  It is, to date, Freestate’s most complicated brief.

The Cloud Screen - early concept sketch - 2011©freestate.com

For us, the task of providing visitors to the Sony stand with a cogent multi-sensory experience, with all the implied audio-visual complexities that such an experience might entail, required a design that is as simple as it is organised. Enter the Renaissance plaza. Ordered, symmetrical, taking its ideas from classical Rome , and copied throughout southern Europe, the public plaza or square, with its predictable sets of entrances, surrounding walkways, straight lines and centralised features, was a reaction to the organic and unplanned feel of medieval living spaces. Compared, for example, with the fiendish complexities of London’s nooks and crannies, the classical and neo-classical public square is famously easy to negotiate.

One such place, the Plaça Reial in Barcelona, from which we drew most inspiration, is simply a system of squares.  Designed in 1848 by Francesc Daniel Molina, it is the city’s only enclosed plaza, its walkways occupied by restaurants, shops and galleries. Despite Gauidi’s lamps, and the later addition of the French-made cast iron fountain, it is a perfect example of neo-classical architecture.

It is almost impossible to get lost in the Plaça Reial. The fountain is its centre point, the walkways surround the square, the buildings delineate its edges, their apertures – entries and exits – regularly spaced.  Even its hidden passages obey the logic of symmetry.  And so, while its great space encourages movement, random happenings, unpredictable surges of activity, or, their opposite, the urge to stop and rest, a stillness, a kind of dreaming, its features continue to serve to direct the visitor – physically or imaginatively – from one part of the Plaça Reial to another. Entertaining, purposeful, engaging, restful, the classical public square is home to many things, to solitude and to crowds, and to great curtains of light and shade.

Which is what we’ve tried to do with this year’s stand. The space is enormous. It is a series of squares within squares. There are 6 entrances. The outer courtyard is broken into rows of clearly laid out avenues of categories of content, all of which are spaces in themselves, but combine to lead towards the centre, or inner court, a curtained off garden of electronic delights, a backlit screen – or cloud – containing some of the most advanced entertainment products on earth. Behind the scenes, much like the plaza’s secret passages, there is a restaurant, 38 meeting rooms and a black box room.

2011 © James McCauley

With its many light shows melded to all types of sound, and these elements in turn tuned to individual spatially defined stories or experiences, textural, interactive, the overall feel of the stand is today’s plaza, the sentient super club: its story depends entirely on the visitor’s position in space and time; over 50% of the stand is quiet, its contents the object of a fascinated and ambient curiosity; its seemingly randomised pockets of activity and noise are contained by its very vastness; and everything must work in perfect concert.

Simple on plan, classically simple in look, it is the most sophisticated event we’ve ever done. It goes live next week. To say we’re a tad nervous would be something of an understatement.

Sounds of the Freestate

Designing live events means we are lucky enough to get to work with a range of ridiculously talented people – architects, designers, musicians, actors, photographers, lighting engineers, the whole caboodle. Chief among these is Andy Visser, sound designer, musician and composer extraordinaire – a man who lives and breathes sound, literally.

A long term friend and partner, we’ve known Andy and his company Sound This Out since 2001, when he collaborated with Adam on a South Bank installation called Electric Storm. Since then, he’s worked on a number of Freestate projects, including the interactive SpinVox Wishing Well in Covent Garden and – for the last four years – on the Sony stands at the IFA in Berlin.

SpinVox Wishing Well, Covent Garden, 2008 - 2008©freestate.com

Andy’s work, particularly the soundscapes developed for the Sony projects, has really helped cement our reputation for producing work that aims to create live, interactive experiences. Technically and artistically brilliant, Andy’s compositions compliment, overlap with and inform the visual structure of the stand. They draw people in. They create specific emotions. They encourage people to interact with elements of the installation in specific ways. But they are by no means overtly instructive or deterministic. They prefer rather that people be allowed to experiment, to explore, to act intuitively.

Sony, 2009, Berlin - 2009©thefoundcollective.com

Experiencing the stand by means of experiment is central to the Sony project, and the space, which at 6000 sq metres is the equivalent in size of two football pitches, is such that the level of sophistication of sound required for such an experience to really work presents something of a challenge: ‘This year we are working with a 12 speaker system spread out in a square with walls that are about 30 metres long – you can imagine that its quite fun to push sounds around a space as big as this.’

2011 Sony stand under construction

And this year, Andy’s designs have spearheaded the project’s development, with the sound ‘shaping the visuals’. A departure from the accepted norm, where the sound is more often than not ‘bolted on’ towards the end of the process, this has meant Andy working on creating an old school analogue-sounding ‘arc’, which started out as a series of experiments with water and other flow sounds, and finished as composition some six minutes long, a piece that starts ‘in a very quiet, ambient way and ends up throwing every sound into a huge whirlpool of gyrating surround sound.’ And it is around this that Adam’s broad concepts for the stand have taken shape.

2007©www.bittbox.com

It’s been a long haul. As well as spending nearly two months in discussion, and three months in design, Sound This Out’s position as creative lead has meant Andy having to liaise – regularly and throughout the development period – with lighting, film, animation and production, as well as with Adam, who has had overall creative responsibility for the show. And it doesn’t stop there. Once happy that their small-scale home version is up to scratch, Andy and sound engineer, Ben Darlow, ‘decamp to Berlin’ where they will spend the next ‘ two or three days tuning the sound design in the hall to make sure that all the sounds, frequencies and movements are as we expected and wanted them.’

It’s a huge undertaking, and one this year that includes the ‘extra task’ of having to ‘put music and special effects onto some films that are still in production – we won’t get sight of the final versions of these until we are already in Berlin so I’m taking out a portable setup to work on the films between for the two days before the show goes on – everything is very tight this year, timing wise.’

Quite.

Andy Visser can be contacted on m. 07545 198129 and e. andy@soundthisout.com