Bang Spring Time is a piece that emerged from a long history of vibrating works with metal springs. It is a long piece, both audibly and visually, a work that needs time to develop and to occupy the space. As in all of our previous work, the challenge has been to find a way of staying with the essential out of infinite artistic, mechanical and digital possibilities that appear. It is a journey that becomes more complex during the trajectory of its creation, a long process that ends up disposing of the extraneous in order to end up with only what is necessary to let the poetry speak. We are not using the springs to move and excite other objects, but the springs themselves are the heroines. They act as long strings, relatively heavy and less tightly strung than the strings that are familiar in musical instruments, resulting in the propagation of a “wave” that is much slower and more visible. It seems as though they manipulate the speed of sound as if by magic. One other characteristic of this piece is that it demonstrates in a very pure form how microseconds of difference can completely change the behavior of a resonant system. Its sound is genuine, produced in real time, no tricks. What you see is what you hear: Very long springs between two resonant bodies. Metal bars strike the springs and a wave is set in motion, traveling between object and object. The sound is born at the same time as the wave, and when the wave dies out the sound also fades away. Or the other way around?
Its first version was produced by and shown at Forja Arte Contemporánea, Valencia, 2009. The same year it was shown as well at Mostra Sonora V, Sueca, Spain.
The project was shown for the first time in an outdoors set-up in the garden of the Fonoteca Nacional, Coyoacán, Mexico City, August 2011 as part of the biennale Transitio_mx.
More info about the festival at https://cmm.cenart.gob.mx/proyectos/transitio.html
November 2016 Bang Spring Time was shown in a new outside version at the XXIII FESTIVAL INTERNACIONAL PUNTO DE ENCUENTRO, organized by AMEE at the Centro del Carmen, Valencia.
At the festival we also premiered Último Esfuerzo Industrial IV (Bosch & Simons + Liberovskaya, see http://www.boschsimons.com/ultimo-esfuerzo-industrial )
In 2023 we took up the project again and have been showing the work twice in a more formal and relatively compact way. We reused the sound chambers that we designed in 2019 for our project Spring Tide and reduced the number of springs from six to four. Julio 2023 a first version was shown, along with Cantan un Huevo, in a solo exhibition in Chelva, the village where we live, in the patio of the Palacio Vizcondal, a building originated in the twelfth century. Here the sound, produced by the springs, could barely been heard outside of the sound chambers, which made the work even more mysterious. It was also practical, minimizing potential problems with surrounding neighbors. The exhibition was organised by the Fundación María Antonia Clavel.
The second time was within the framework of AVAN/03, a project that took place in the inlands of the province Castelló, initiated by Rafael Tormo Cuenca. September 2023 our exhibition La Fábrica de Memorias opened in an abandoned convent in Forcall, Castelló, Spain. It consists of two installations and a video, inspired by a long tradition of espadrille production in and around Forcall. We added four new sound chambers, which were ancient cauldrons that filled the large body of the church with a mix of metallic sounds and low frequencies.
Special thanks to Günter Geiger for his assistance in the development of the software written in PureData and to Peter Van der Hoogt, associate professor at the faculty of mechanical engineering of the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands for helping us with the scientific research.