Self Oscillation
Room Sheet text by Robert O’Connor
“Why doesn’t he just write some music?”
We don’t get what we ask for, we get what we deserve, and Self Oscillation is an orchestral work for our hyper-globalised now: bent on dysfunction and bursting at the seams.
Trained at the College Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati, Dylan Sheridan is a composer masquerading as an artist. An unlikely Dennis the Menace type who spends an unnecessary amount of effort trying to shortcut his one purpose: composition.
As so, a heap of defunct capital-C Crap is conscripted to do his problem solving for him:
-A pressurized ketchup bottle transcribes and notates sheet music to create the orchestra score, signed “Dylan Sheridan”,
-Some off-brand laptop acts as the Conductor and does what it’s told to do while the Great Composer Dylan Sheridan goes out for lunch,
-Decade-old consumer-grade electronics are the collateral damage of Dylan Sheridan’s personal and deeply violent war.
This all leads to a short-circuiting that requires correction and counter-correction and re-correction and so on, and so forth. Hippie wind chimes have no wind so are bullied by electric currents and the clothes dryer ends up being a prosaic and ham-fisted Timpanist. Their visual incongruousness is the result of over-solving a problem.
Far from being an aberrant condition, this is the normal state for most of us who are habitually conscripted into repetitive and reactive behaviours by our unseen masters. These robot performers might be the great-granddaddies of the Skynet machines in Terminator or the bumpkin cousins of the Boston Dynamics dog. But for now, they are like the banal cultural workers of late capitalism. They do their little jobs and their only allocated freedom is to occasionally break down.
And wail.
They are like us.
Ahhh, fuck…
Robert O’Connor,
November 29, 2021
Photos by Peter Matthew