Dylan Ricards is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in the fields of sculpture and sound who is endlessly fascinated with the materiality of the post-natural world, peering between moral ecological binaries where contamination occurs and the possibilities of magic in art are revealed.
Artist Location: Long Beach, CA
Social Media:
PARTICIPATION
Installation:
Material Feedback Loop
Feedback is a phenomenon that occurs when the output of something returns to its input. I think about the feedback of materiality in the world. Sites of material as origins and destinations and the wall of sound that those circuits manifest. The Port of Los Angeles is a resonator. A receiver of material information, amplifying its frequency through redistribution across the US. I drive through the port often to reach San Pedro and the tide pools and hikes that lie just north of this industrial gauntlet. As I drive south on the 710 past downtown Long Beach and across the Gerald Desmond bridge the sound changes. The din of a thousand trucks shaking the roadways and cranes loading and unloading shipping containers is all I can hear. I drive with my windows down to better hear it. To me the sound is not separate from the tidepools or the sound of the sea. For the sound of the sea is not just moving water. It is a feedback loop of materiality reverberating around the Earth.
Future Fetish
ARTIST STATEMENT
I have a friend who schedules an hour in their day, every day around 5, to cuddle with their cat. They don’t take calls, or do phone shit, or anything else. It’s a ritual.
DESCRIPTION
A plastiglomerate boulder is counterweighted with a television, tyed in shibari knots, playing video content. Power is needed for the television and media. I’d love to suspend the counterweighted objects from an existing overhang as a way to to tie the work into the site. If this is not possible, I can provide an armature.
Heavy Metal Machine
Installation:
Heavy Metal Machine is a sculptural installation that highlights the ever presence of sound in our world by acting both as a sound prism, reacting in realtime to changes in its surrounding environment. It offers an opportunity to be hyper present in moments of chaos and harmony.
Mundane ambient noise – the rhythm of passing footsteps, the white noise of automobiles in the background, birds conversing in a tree canopy, the chatter of children – all become source code for this closed circuit system.
Heavy Metal Machine consists of a rectangular steel armature supporting a suspended sheet of stainless steel, and a second steel armature suspending a stainless steel vessel filled with water. A microphone is positioned between the armatures capturing ambient sound, which is fed into a mixer and then sent to transducers adhered to the back of both the stainless steel sheet and water vessel.
As ambient sound is captured by the microphone, it is sent to the transducers and reverberated through the steel sheet and steel vessel, creating intense self oscillating drones that ebb and flow depending on the state of the environment around the structure. In particular, as sound is amplified through the water vessel, it is visualized in chaotic cymatic forms, making visible the auditory energy that engulfs us and guides us.
Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2021:
Dylan Ricards with Charles XXV
Sound Bath
“Sound Bath” was conceived as a way to perceive sound both visually, physically, and socially and was designed to be appreciated as an aesthetically pleasing and calming physical object.
In this iteration, we will be mic’ing the environment to capture the sound that will manipulate the bath, creating an interactive experience for viewers.