Craig Mulholland @ Queens Park Railway Club
Craig Mulholland pairs high-finish works with looping atmospheric electro audio for Suspended Intervals in Queens Park Railway Club.
Straight away there’s the music track, the first part of Craig Mulholland’s Suspended Intervals. It’s a short and ambient track, with one indecipherable voice and another that becomes understandable, syncing with the two screens opposite one another. They instruct: “Say what you mean, mean what you say.” It’s only around one minute before it is repeated, and gives the sense of menu music on a DVD left looping: it doesn’t go anywhere.
There aren’t many elements to the installation. Two open flight cases are in the middle of the room on top of keyboard stands. On the inside they are reflective with a keyboard printed on the inside of each, with the keys raised in the chord of Dsus2. Separated into two, half the room is repeated in the other half, but rotated 180 degrees so they face each other.
With these printed keyboards, and the synth playing via a media player and through speakers at the side, the computer generated track relates only to the mock instruments in the way YouTube was once signified by an icon of a boxy television with tuning dials. There’s a certain functional nostalgia to these visual shorthands that simplify new means of distribution and production, like the cog of all settings functions. There’s a frustration to the configuration of the work – these keys cannot be pressed, that manual directness is only a fiction until current digital means of production and distribution can be visualised.
Hands are irrelevant again when it comes to the high finish of the objects, whether in the laser etched glass or the “Say what you mean” animation on the screens which are rendered in the style of huge stadium gig visuals. Looping over and over, the call to “say what you mean” is heard (though very muffled) from the platform. Seen from outside, the installation is enough for itself, answering over and over with an indecipherable robotic voice in an empty room.