Hand Made machines, sonic sculptures of wood and steel, field recordings of the amazon and bronze bells were used to create this analog soundscape.

Half Light / EP Wyrd Lodge

Sol Bailey-Barker uses repurposed and obsolete technology, sound equipment, DIY contact mics and ‘alien-megalithic’ sculptural forms to create an (extra)terrestrial sound machine. This sensory-informational web poses questions about our obsessive relationship with technology and the kinds of knowledge it can mediate. Between conspiracy theory and recorded data, ARE WE ALONE? is an introspective, extraterrestrial investigation into Bailey-Barker’s own practice, ancient tools and Cosmic noise.

In 1899 Nikola Tesla documented what was thought to be the first extraterrestrial message, discovered during his pioneering experiments with radio waves. Since then thousands of scientists and amateurs have built radio telescopes to listen to the stars.  

"The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time. The information fed to us we hypostatise into the phenomenal world… The phenomenal world does not exist, it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the mind." Philip K Dick

ARE WE ALONE? Ufology

‘Hand Made Machines & Machine Made Hands’ is a multi-media installation presenting a body of kinetic and sonic sculptures within a dystopian glowing pink laboratory clad in black PVC. Combining steel and charred oak sculptures with hospital mechanisms, biospheres, scans of animal brains, a restored organ, plants and re-purposed analogue technology, this installation explores ideas around the imminent extinction of insect species, the evolution of technology from the ancient axe to contemporary prosthetics, the symbolism of monuments and ideas emerging from science fiction and science fact.

DIVINE ELEVATION EQUIPTMENT

Divine lifting equipment

Sol Bailey-Barker is a British multi-disciplinary artist working primarily with sculpture, sound and performance. Informed by the development of technologies that were for millennia seen as shamanic for their transformative power upon the landscape and their influence over life and death, Bailey-Barker's practice follows this journey of body-hacking and augmentation from the ancient sacred axe to contemporary prosthetics and machinery. Working with found objects, building immersive environments which combine the constructed with the found, he explores the uncertainty of history, revisiting narratives from a parallel non-colonial perspective.

Bailey-Barker's abstract sculptures draw from symbolism and objects he studies, using materials associated with both agriculture and industry to provoke an association between the industrial born from technological development and its ancient spiritual origins. Using repurposed technology, archive recordings, obsolete analogue machines and found instruments, Bailey-Barker creates soundscapes which feed through the surfaces of his sculptures building live informational webs. The performance of his sonic-sculptures follows his enquiry into the relationship between form and sound making audible the inherent properties of varying materials and forms as well as the silent history contained in objects.

Sol Bailey Barker

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