INSTANT COFFEE
ROTARY BANDSHELL, RIVERSIDE PARK
Instant Coffee is a service oriented curatorial and artist collective based in Toronto and Vancouver. The collective’s artistic practice is most often in support of building social platforms for organized events that have ranged from formal lectures and screenings to informal gatherings and workshops. Most often these socially engaged pieces are initiated at the request of a host organization. Spanning over ten years, their activities have been exhibited at such institutions as MKG 127, Toronto; Teck Gallery, Vancouver; Sølyst, Denmark; Kuenstlerhaeuser Worpswede, Germany; Vancouver Art Gallery; Mercer Union, Toronto; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and the Yerba Buena Centre of Art, San Francisco. IC will be participating in the residence programme at Incheon Art Platform, S. Korea, and they have two forthcoming publications with Western Front, Vancouver and YYZ Artist Outlet, Toronto. As part of the City of Vancouver’s 2010 Cultural Olympic programme, IC opened Light Bar a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue. This project was recommissioned for the New Forms Festival (2014).
Instant Coffee: Pink Noise
Working with the basic principle that we are hard-wired to receive and distinguish certain unique hues of colour, the artist collective Instant Coffee prod to heighten pinkish sentiments. Their ongoing research project Pink Noise drives at colliding and provoking the basic sensory mechanics of colour and sound to form temperamental emotional connections. Their cursory research takes its initial form as part of Luminocity as a gathering place and a series of music performances. Instant Coffee will turn Kamloops’ Rotary Bandshell at Riverside Park into a vibrant pink-washed venue from which to host four evenings of events. Come through the back and delve into a material investigation of pink noise.
Pink noise is a variant of white noise, which has been reduced in volume and density at each octave. Pure white noise is a combination of all octaves, with each octave doubling in frequency. With pink noise there is the possibility to select a frequency. The number of octaves can be reduced. It may only contain six octaves or be played at six decibels. Its differing and speculative form ultimately results in a noise sound wave that has equal energy at every octave. For Instant Coffee these variables are an opening where sound waves can translate into colour and solid mass. There is a pseudo-science (a space between art, science, design and the absurd) that the artist collective is interested in bringing to the forefront. This is something they see as positive. Science itself has definite limits while pseudo-science is inexhaustible.
Photos: Devon Lindsay, 2014