The Beauty of the Unpredicatable
by Anna Gerber
Grafix, June 2013

Writer Anna Gerber catches designer, musician and digital pioneer Paul Farrington as he moves away from screen-based digital work to undertake a giant installation covering a 196m walkway at Imperial College. Yet the work is as interactive as any of Farrington’s online projects. He has left the realm of invisible ones and zeroes and entered the world of scientific discovery, Britney Spears posters and rugby fixtures.

Paul Farrington, who works under the name Studio Tonne, is at a point in his life when he’s preoccupied with time. His father died three years ago and he himself is the father of three kids. ‘Personally, I’m interested in time,’ he tells me by phone from his studio in Brighton, on a rare sunny Thursday in August. ‘I like the idea of there being more permanence.’ Best known for the interactive on-line ‘sound toys’ he created for Mute Records artists’, Moby and Depeche Mode, Farrington has recently finished a large scale mural for London’s Imperial College, which lines a 196 meter long walkway and envelopes numerous columns along the way.

The mural is an intriguing departure for him, a very real indication that he and his work are both moving into a wholly new direction. We talk about how things are changing for him and how that’s best exemplified by the recent Imperial College commission. ‘For me, it’s lasting. A lot of the stuff we do – you know it sits there, it’s a website, it’s a flyer, it’s a book. This is going to be used. It’s public. I’m at the point now where I’m interested in things lasting a bit longer.’

Sound led interfaces

Farrington grew up in Ellesmere Port, in the north west of England, and got an HND from Sheffield. He studied at Liverpool John Moores University before going on to study for an MA at the Royal College of Art (a period of his life he refers to as a ‘two year sabbatical’), from where he graduated in 1998. While at the RCA, Farrington developed two projects which would pave the way for his later work. The first, Audible Communities, was an interactive installation which encouraged users to create their own unique experiences. The second, Designs for a Deaf Audience, was a project driven by sound led interfaces.

Using these two projects as his career springboard, it comes as no surprise to learn that Farrington continued to pursue the relationship between music and visual environments after leaving the RCA. He spent the next ten years working as a musician (he released three albums as Studio Tonne) while simultaneously designing websites and doing print-based work for clients, as diverse as the Miller Harris Perfumery, 4AD records and Rotovision, the publishing house.

His soundtoys and later his noisetoy, however, are what Studio Tonne are best known for and what constitutes their most genuinely visionary work. These interactive projects are online musical environments. The first soundtoy was released in 2002 to accompany Tonne’s debut album, Soundtoy (BipHop Records). The first soundtoy constituted screen-based software which allowed the user to create his or her own music. Depeche Mode saw the piece and Farrington was asked to create an on-line soundtoy for them. Released in 2004, the Depeche Mode soundtoy worked like a DJ remix tool, to accompany their Remixes 81-04 album (Mute).

Commissions for Moby, the label Mute, and Simon Fisher Turner, soon followed. The ingenuety of the soundtoys is that they succeed in creating a space (albeit a virtual space) where music can be seen. And more than this, they create a space where the user can control and create the music that he/she wants to see (and of course, hear).

But lately, as mentioned earlier, Farrington’s focus has recently been bent to a new focus. His commission for Imperial College in South Kensington, London, is simply different, a tangible departure from his earlier work. The first thing you notice is the scale of the work. ‘It’s been one of the most physical pieces of work I’ve done,’ says Farrington, of the project, which is the largest of his career. The brief came to Farrington by sheer chance. He joined the RCA alumni seven years after graduating and started to get email notifications about various jobs. One of the emails he received, concerned a project with the Imperial College.

The brief was quite simple. There is a main walkway which connects two of the college’s buildings. The walkway is the main throroughfare for the students. As it stands now, students use the space to put up posters and notices about events happening at and around the college. With its busy role in the students’ everyday life, Imperial College decided that they wanted to decorate the space but still make sure the space could be used by the students.

Farrington’s response was to design a series of visual explorations made up of spirals, rotations and notes hinting at, but not overdoing, a scientific visual language. These were then printed onto glass. Interspersed throughout are photographs of open notebooks. The notebooks, which Farrington sourced from all over the country, are used, beaten, their corners pleasingly crumpled – a far cry from the digitised vector-based visual language he used for the soundtoys. The notebooks are there to be used as noticeboards by the students. Printed onto a material called foamlux – a hardwearing material that allows for things to be put on it, built up and then pulled off – their very surface (not to mention the fact that they are open notebooks, the pages constantly serving as a visual invitation to the students), lends itself to an interactive rapport. ‘I like the idea that hopefully over time, things will go up, things will be taken off, tape will stay on it, it will give that kind of history of the space.’

Interactive Dimension

The space will turn into something new because the students will end up also designing the space. Farrington compares the interactive element to the way that notebooks are used, the way that we (scientists, artists, writers) tend to fill notebooks. We also talk about the beauty of the unpredictable – how we actually don’t know what the notebooks will be filled with, we don’t know what they will look like. “I might go in next week and there’ll be a big poster of Britney Spears on the notebooks. And I can’t control that. Or something about the rugby. But that’s part of what’s going to happen. And I think that’s okay. The notebooks are an open system and the idea is that they’re open to be used however they want to be. And I like that.”

There’s another interactive dimension to the work that Farrington will have even less control over: nature. The work is a permanent installation, which has meant that the choice of materials has played a key part in the design process. Not only in their eventual functionality (i.e. the glass for the artwork, the foamlux for the notebooks), but also in the way they will change over time – within the course of a single day, but also long term. All elements of the work will be open to manipulations by students passing through the college, climate, time, ageing. ‘Every step is like a new thing to look at. The colour of the glass. The time of day. Nightime. The way it’s being lit.’

And there we are again, back to the idea of these murals having a real sense of permanence, the idea that this space is something that grows and transforms with time, with age. Paul Farrington may be a father of three, it may be that he’s preoccupied with the idea of time, but when he tells me that he’s more interested in designing furniture that music, I laugh and tell him that sounds pretty grown up. So he says, ‘Yeah, maybe it’s a chair that makes music. That would be very rock and roll.’ I can’t wait.

Working within the confines of the CNC production process, I ran tests to determine how different line weights would behave when engraved at different depths.

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