Gibbameter

Sound Installation

Weimar. Germany. 2015.

The installation is and functional tool to measure the smoothness of the German roads and its invention was motivated by the mesmerized myth about the roads in Germany claiming that it’s even possible to carry a glass full of water on them without spilling it.

Background:

The carefree lifestyle with the background of ruined roads, this is the main picture captured in my memory from my childhood spent during the last years of the communist Soviet Union, oh yes, and the mesmerized expressions of the listeners upon hearing that on the roads of the capitalistic Germany it’s even possible to carry a glass full of water without any spillage.

The supposedly succeeded model of prolonged social hope of the communistic myth, tracing its images as achieved objectives of socialistic utopias; framed as an reified model of all labourers’ desires of all times and constraining its possession from the externality, or more likely to say, restraining its content from the external temptations, from the charms of the ‘perverted’ world of capitalism, that despite of all its struggles to marginalize it, was still increasing its power to seduce.

The work is an allegory for an existing nostalgic system which, amongst its alternatives, justifies its privilege mainly due to the priority of social/urban surrounding, and where, in spite of the government controlled media and a robust anti-capitalistic propaganda, the existing social guarantees can be overpowered by the myth that when travelling on the road of Germany (FRG) it is even possible to carry a glass full of water without spilling it.

Technical description:

In the project a two coach bus has been used, particularly the middle part (the one that holds the carriages together) – the part that represents the most unstable and turbulent fragment and the only part that represents variable shape within its space. This part also represents a way of measurement for the quality of the travelled road, because unlike the rotation around the horizontal axis due to the bus making a left or right turn, the deviation from the horizontal axis is a representative of the smoothness or the quality of the road, the flaws and imperfections should result on the displacement between the planes of the floorings of the two coaches that should be observable by us.

In this process the air pump is fitted between the two points having a varying distance between them. The force will produce displacement and therefore work, that will apply pressure to inflame the installation. As a result we will get and object that will be sensitive towards the slightest faults encountered on the road and it will be interacted with this specific section of the road (Weimar-Buchenwald).