A THOUSAND WORDS.

Tim Hawkinson TALKS ABOUT UBERORGAN

When Mass MOCA offered me the gallery, I was confronted with the question of how to deal with an interior space the size of a football field. I responded almost immediately with the general idea of what became Uberorgan. The room has a ceiling structure that resembles a rib cage, so it seemed natural to fill it with internal organs. Years ago, I came across a photo of an Inuit with an inflated sealskin, and it really stuck in my mind. The bagpipe's shape is modeled on the stomach--in fact, the first bagpipes were actually made of stomachs--so there's a historical connection between inflated organs and skins and bagpipes. And I liked the idea of making an organ in the musical sense from organs of the body.

Also, early on, I learned that Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick while he was living in Pittsfield, which is just down the road from Mass MoCA. My piece relates to the book and more generally to the nautical, with all the netting and lashing and rigging and the foghomlike sounds and the massive rib cage and organs.

I had already made a piece based on bagpipes, and other works using player piano--type devices and reeds and valves--in one case to try to simulate human speech and in another to generate harmonic humming similar to that of the Tuvan tradition from central Asia. My piece Cow, 1997, used hollow segments of a mannequin as little drums. With Pentecost, 1999, a large tree filled with life-size humanoid figures that make different sounds, the scale really increased: The viewer didn't walk around the piece, but rather walked in it. So Uberorgan grew out of different aspects of a lot of other pieces.

I'm curious about how sound can be formed right before your eyes. Uberorgan's ducts and bags are translucent, and the chambers containing the reeds are clear plastic, so you can see what's going on and follow it through all its courses. I think of the piece as a kind of assembly line or processing plant for sound.

I took a Casio keyboard I've had since high school and put microswitches on its keys, which I then wired to a recording device that raises and lowers pens on a roll of paper. When you press a key, it triggers the corresponding pen and makes a mark for however long you hold the key down. These marks on paper are the basis for the paint marks on the Mylar roll that Uberorgan reads, much the way a player piano reads a paper roll.

The score is derived from various musical pieces, and the selection is limited largely to ones I happened to know or that friends knew, so you get church hymns like "In Christ There Is No East or West" combined with "Sailor's Hornpipe" and "Heart and Soul." I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, particularly folk and traditional American music, which is where some of the hornpipe segments come from.

I based the score on preexisting music because I wanted there to be at least a chance that viewers would be familiar with the combinations of sounds they were hearing, but it's a familiarity that fades in and out. There are improvisations by me and other artists mixed in, and some of the numbers are fairly obscure. There are also some big discrepancies between the source music and what Uberorgan plays. Everything is slowed down considerably, and something that might span several octaves is contained within a single octave, which does weird things to a recognizable melody. Also, in transferring the score from the recording on the paper roll to the Mylar roll, I painted the marks a little sloppily, and at times they overlap, so there's a slurring from one note to the next.

There are also mechanisms that distort the score and alter Uberorgan's "voice." There's a scale inverter that flip-flops the orientation of the notes, and a key shifter that changes the pitch. There's an echo switch that repeats whatever is being cued, so the bleating/moaning sounds get louder and more chaotic, and then there's a filter that softens everything. All of these are on motion detectors or timers that get tripped in random combinations, so although a score repeats, the machine's interpretation is random, and the patterns come out differently each time around. I'm hoping to mix it up more by making changes to the Mylar roll periodically during the year.

Someone visiting the museum while I was installing the piece told me that Uberorgan sounded like a Doppler exam, where they listen to your organs and the blood coursing through your veins and all that. But I'm a little skeptical. That just sounded too good to be true.

A Post-it note almost imperceptibly twitching on a page to mark time; a model sailing ship stretched full circle until bow and stern merge like a snake eating its tail; a skeleton assembled out of rawhide dog bones: Tim Hawkinson's work is always surprising. But with Uberorgan he's outdone himself. A combination bagpipe, pipe organ, and player piano elegantly jury-rigged mostly out of materials you might find at your local Home Depot and RadioShack, Uberorgan is a behemoth sound-producing instrument. Its principal components are twelve Winnebago-size polyethylene bags lashed to the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition space and corseted into shape with nylon rope and tuna-fishing nets. It looks like bodily organs set in a gargantuan chest and abdominal cavity.

Hawkinson's organ is "conducted" by a machine that uses photoelectric cells to read painted dots and dashes on a 250-foot-long roll of Mylar. The device controls a set of valves attached to twelve bags, determining the amount of air the bags squeeze through a collection of reeds, which are in turn attached to twenty-four-foot pipes. The air blowing through these pipes produces a series of droning blasts that range the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, making strange but familiar music, like an ensemble of foghorns playing variations on a theme from Swan Lake.

Uberorgan is on display until June 2001. at Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where it fills the museum's 18,000-square-foot Gallery 5. It took Hawkinson a little less than a year to make all the components and about three weeks to install the finished product. My final interview with him took place a few minutes before the opening on June 3. He had just replaced a bank of shorted-out photo cells and was enjoying a well-earned break from his labors.