MIDIBISHI is an innovative, cross-artform project devised, created and performed by artists David Kotlowy, Dexter Campos and Eric Bagnara, with curator Emily Collins. Premiering in July 2022 at the Tonsley Innovation District in southern Adelaide, it encompasses sculpture, music composition, performance and video.

 

The project was conceived by the four collaborators out of a fascination with industrial sites, sounds and materials, and a common interest in exploring their working-class, familial histories as migrant workers in local factories – including automotive assembly plants.

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Fashioned from a 1981 Mitsubishi Sigma model once assembled on the Tonsley site, THE MIDIBISHI sculpture brings the art world to the manufacturing world.

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In parking mode, the sculpture broadcasts a shuffling interchange of experimental music soundscapes composed by Kotlowy, Campos and Bagnara. In their absence, the sculpture is the literal vehicle through which these artists express their creative visions, as inspired by industry.

 

That some of their compositions integrate, or build from, real or imagined industrial sounds, is both fitting and challenging to the ear. Industries have always operated to the tune of their own soundtrack or soundscape, albeit one that tends to be occupationally hazardous. Industrial machines and processes are strikingly noisy.

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Assessing the status of music in industry during World War II in 1944, Wheeler Beckett and Lee Fairley noted the commonplace installation of public address systems in British factories, for use in case of an air raid. These were repurposed for broadcasting music to industrial workers, generating a ‘new atmosphere for work’ on the factory floor. The aim was to transcend the boredom and discomfort associated with carrying out repetitive tasks, and effectively provide a metronome for production.

 

Conducting a study in 1941 on the effects of occupational music on scrappage, J Humes determined that playing fast or slow music reduced fatigue in the female radio-tube assemblers, resulting in less worksite accidents.

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From 1940 until 1967, BBC Radio broadcast to millions of factory workers a daily program called Music While You Work. According to Keith Jones, the program content was designed to “resound … through the large industrial spaces and above the constant mechanical noise which defined the factory’s sonic landscape”, providing an ‘affective soundtrack’ that would enhance worker productivity – and thereby profit.

 

THE MIDIBISHI, powered by music, is productive. Like a factory in constant production, on three-shift rotation, it operates 24/7. 

 

THE MIDIBISHI never sleeps.

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THE MIDIBISHI speaks to Tonsley’s industrial history as a Mitsubishi Assembly Plant, with its Japanese company origins. And it speaks for auto workers of manufacturers past – including those who graced the factory floor that is now Tonsley.

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Broadcast through the car’s hollows, the artists’ compositions sing an elegy for the death of the old South Australian automotive industry.

 

THE MIDIBISHI remembers. 

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An old car brought to fantastical life using music technology, it also envisions the way of the future. Honouring the artistry in industry, THE MIDIBISHI seeks to inspire the manufacturing innovators of today. Its story as a whole represents the trajectory of manufacturing in Australia.

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On three occasions throughout the duration of the installation, the car sculpture is shifted into a higher gear with THE MIDIBISHI performance-spectacles.

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Bespoke MIDI technology transforms the sculpture into a musical instrument played by the artists and curator. Now actively participating in the creation of music, the car becomes an additional live performer, to which the musicians respond.

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The three immersive performances reference the visual and sonic spectacle of the manufacturing process, in recognition that factory work is performative and ritualistic.

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The performance is framed through three overarching segments – the Japanese ‘Mitsu’ in Mitsubishi translating to the number three – representing the past, present and potential future; interpreted and driven by composers Kotlowy, Campos and Bagnara respectively.

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Disrupting conventional temporality, however, these time constructs are diced and spliced into disorder. As with THE MIDIBISHI sculpture, the artists play out their visions live on shuffle. In MIDIBISHI time, the past, present and future of manufacturing at once slide and coincide.

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THE MIDIBISHI is an artwork specific to Mitsubishi history, yet claims a general space in broader car-pop and car-art culture. To some, it may recall the DeLorean time-travelling automobile in the Sci-Fi movie Back to the Future. But with its whited-out windows, THE MIDIBISHI drives blind.

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Painted white to recall the 20th century ‘white cube’ gallery aesthetic, THE MIDIBISHI brings its own gallery walls to the manufacturing site. It is both the art and the canvas. A work of art; it references the art of making (cars), and the making of art. 

 

Enamelled in white, THE MIDIBISHI is box-y in habitus. Its visual texture is toothpaste-y. It is the white of white noise. Sonic static. The white of a welding arc. The white of Wonkavision. With its 80s aesthetic, it is the synth pop of Gary Numan. 

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THE MIDIBISHI sneaks modestly into the canon of white-ish car-art installations: Cai Guo Qiang’s Inopportune: Stage One (2004). Charles Ray’s silent, fibreglass Unpainted Sculpture (1997). THE MIDIBISHI is a cultural symbol beloved to this sprawling nation. It is the found object of the car, painted white and elevated to art.

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Ursula Frederick, who undertook an ‘art and automobility’ pilgrimage for her doctoral research, relates an encounter with a diagram of a Holden car model at the National Library of Australia in 2005 to the concept of 'ostranenie' coined in 1917 by Viktor Shklovsky: ‘to make strange that which is familiar’. To frame a car as art makes us look at it anew.

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THE MIDIBISHI, with its strange blindness, unexpected soundscapes and inner glow, projects what Ellen Dissanayake refers to as an 'extra-ordinary dimension of experience' achieved when ordinary objects are made ‘special’ by being turned into art. As a utilitarian, mass-produced object taken from the 'inventory of everyday life', THE MIDIBISHI sculpture also has Readymade art tendencies, à la Marcel Duchamp. Frederick argues that it was the disruption of divisions between 'high' and 'low' art by the Readymade movement that enabled the automobile to even be accepted as ‘art’.

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Installed in the former Mitsubishi Assembly Plant at Tonsley, THE MIDIBISHI references its own making, but also a loss of making. Australian artist Margaret Dodd - whose notable artworks include the white ceramic Bridal Holden (1977) - spoke in a 2017 interview not only with concern regarding the impending closure of the Holden car factory in Elizabeth, and associated decline of traditional manufacturing, but also about an unease for a future where cars have 'brains' and drive themselves.

 

With its boxy 1980s body, THE MIDIBISHI looks to Mitsubishi past. Powered by a dynamic red cord inserted into its boot, it also looks to the present trend of electric vehicles. And its blind windscreen gives us that sense of unease of which Dodd speaks. THE MIDIBISHI can no longer be driven by a human driver. In the future of driverless vehicles (a future perhaps already here: Tonsley has a driverless shuttle that shuffles around the site), will we need to see through the windscreen at all?

 

Or will we be content to 'drive' blind?

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I could end this curator statement here. But THE MIDIBISHI is not just a white art-car to be seen and not seen through.

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Again: it is a vehicle for inspiring and expressing the creativity of three Adelaide composers: David Kotlowy, Dexter Campos and Eric Bagnara.

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MIDIBISHI is ultimately a performance project, with sound its true engine.

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First to the sculpture soundscapes: the compositional play on GPS voices by Kotlowy channels Laurie Anderson’s futuristic electro-pop song ‘O Superman’. That song shares a birthday with the 1981 Sigma that gave birth to THE MIDIBISHI.

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Campos’ and Bagnara’s respective compositions set up an industrial conversation in the acoustic languages of metalwork and engines. These are variously punctuated by pronouncements of Mitsubishi sales stats, washes of reverb drone and bursts of sweet electronica.

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So to the live performance spectacles. Here, the three composers drive the audience through an aural landscape that shifts from the traditional Japanese sounds of gagaku and shakuhachi to the machinations and automations of production on an Australian auto assembly line. And, with reverence to Adelaide’s status in the 1990s as a sister techno capital to Detroit – we approach our final destination through a techno showdown.

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David Kotlowy’s eerie cicadas – sampled and effect-ed – congruously transplant a symbol of life in Japanese summer into a concrete warehouse in the dead of South Australian winter. His jaunty drum sequence propels us back to 1980s industrial Australiana, circa early Hunters and Collectors.

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On stage, percussionist Dexter Campos drops a spanner to the factory floor, transforming a turning tool for mechanics into a striking tool for musicians. 

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Kotlowy reimagines this tool entirely. Suspending a whole series of spanners on a rack, he coopts Campos' MIDI circuitry to realise a new electronic instrument. Charged via a mass of coloured wires, the spanners are coaxed to express anything from the zen sounds of a Japanese zither (Kotlowy’s composition: ‘Kototronics’) to samples of Australian drawl from 1980s Mitsubishi ads (Campos: 'Mitsu-voices').

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Fast forward to the future. Eric Bagnara’s finale composition transitions us through a Clockwork Orangesque opening into an exciting, stuttering battery of techno beats and computerised voices. F-F-F-F-F-FUTURE, FUTURE … AUTOMATED. AUTOMATED. SOLAR. DRIVERLESS. Then finally to the animated spectre of THE MIDIBISHI: that driverless art-vehicle, spinning dreamily outside the realm of worldly GPS coordinates.

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And betwixt this Japanese car-company past, and faceless-driverless future, is the ebb and grind of Campos’ haunting industrial homage to the factory in all its physicality. A sonic-welding of work-noise, vintage synths and samples of voices recruited from the old Tonsley car plant, his compositions celebrate, and commiserate, blue-collar labour and the pride therein.

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Michael Goddard (2008) attributes the initial use of industrial sounds in composition to Italian and Russian futurists in the 20th century. German band Kraftwerk later worked with these sounds to contrive an aural aesthetic of ‘inhuman mechanicism’. According to Goddard, the 1970s band Throbbing Gristle created what they called ‘industrial music’ as a commentary on the demise of factory labour and Fordist production. 

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The inhuman mechanicism of Kraftwerk makes an impression on the live performance of Campos’ major composition in the show. At the boot of THE MIDIBISHI, two artists morph into automated mechanisms, enacting the rigid swivel-and-press of programmed apparatus on a factory assembly line. As the music grows more intense and tense, their motion becomes ever-urgent … until the lunch bell rings.

 

The decline of blue-collar factory labouring, and transition to white-collar ‘manufacturing’ with a focus on advanced design and automation, is manifest in the roll call of elite manufacturers that comprise Tonsley’s current residents. These include TESLA and ACE EV.

 

The old Mitsubishi Assembly Plant has been reinvented as an Innovation District. Tonsley’s creation out of the Plant’s ashes is a local success story.

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The artists recognised this reinvention when they repurposed a 1981 Sigma to make THE MIDIBISHI sculpture. Recycling is of course both the present and the future.

 

Throughout its own Tonsley residency, THE MIDIBISHI, broadcasting atmospheric soundscapes all day, generates a new work atmosphere for these high-end, new-age manufacturers. 

 

In memory of Adelaide’s automotive and other long-lost, old-school factories that operated all through the bewitching hours, it broadcasts all through the night too.

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THE MIDIBISHI never sleeps. It keeps a light on within – the light of local manufacturing. At times a mere flame-flicker, this light nevertheless burns on …
 

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​Bibliography

 

Wheeler Beckett and Lee Fairley (1944) ‘Music in industry: a bibliography’. Notes, Second Series, 1(4), pp. 14–20.

 

J Humes (1942) ‘The effects of occupational music on scrappage in the manufacture of radio tubes’. Journal of Applied Psychology, 25, pp. 573–587.

 

Keith Jones (2005) ‘Music in factories: a twentieth-century technique for control of the productive self’. Social and Cultural Geography, 6(5), pp. 723–744.

 

Ursula K Frederick (2013) On and off the road: creative intersections between cars and art, PhD thesis, The Australian National University, Canberra.

 

Viktor Shklovsky 1998 (1917) ‘Art as technique’. In Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds) Literary theory: an anthology. Oxford and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, pp. 17–23.

 

Ellen Dissanayake (1992) HomoAestheticus: where art comes from and why. New York and Toronto: The Free Press, Maxwell Macmillan.

 

Suzie Keen (2017) ‘This Woman is Not a Car: feminist funk art of the Holden era’, InDaily, 7 September, https://indaily.com.au/inreview/2017/09/07/woman-not-car-feminist-funk-art-holden-era/

 

Michael Goddard (2008) ‘Sonic and cultural noise as production of the new: the industrial music media ecology of Throbbing Gristle’. In Simon O' Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (eds) Deleuze, Guattari and the production of the new. London and NY: Continuum Books, pp. 162–172.