Claire Tolan – Shush Tones

claire-tonal-shush-tones

designed cover + download code – panke.gallery

Shush Tones’ package is a 12” traditional paperboard in a limited edition of 100 copies. It’s nothing really special at first sight, but actually inside the paper box there is a plexiglass square sheet with a code number to download the work on the plexiglass surface. According to the goals of the collective panke.gallery, this design empathizes an aspect: it’s still a digital collection item, so it’s an art work. At the same time, the collective doesn’t ignore to chance to spread the main contents of the work, which are full of contemporary creativity and are meticulously organized by Claire Tolan. Digital activism, net art and club culture are the focus of the electronic crew, who thinks of these editions as a way to support the artists and the continuous gallery projects. For this edition Claire Tolan produced new exclusive sets of SUSH Tones, a system of sounds and phone tunes for iOS and Android. These sets take the name of SHUSH Basilisk, Truth To SHUSH, Bayesian SHUSH, Rare Earth Tones, SHUSH Vuln and SHUSH Yoke. In the construction of technological imaginary worlds, there is a reference to complex systems, to a reformatted collective awareness and to communication on a planetary scale. Mobile phones, always more omnipresent and pervasive in our daily life, become the perfect tool for these experiments. Phone sounds “dramatize” our days and stimulate different and unconventional suggestions. Phone tunes have long been used to create customer loyalty for a brand or to highlight the attachment to some cultural memes. Here they get a critical reinterpretation, in relation to the mass culture and the under-categorised space of the alarm systems. Some tunes are created for specific announcements, others are vague, inspired by an abstract and evocative “narration.” SHUSH wants to remodel our perception: we don’t know if this can really happen, but here any message seems insinuating, any notice is meditative, a little drop of synthetic estrangement in an ocean of words too often trivially conformed.

 

shush-tones

 

claire-tonal