Original FOUNDtracks: Discovering FOUND’s new invention

TOMMY PERMAN laughs as I check I’ve understood the mechanics of FOUND’s latest art project, as if even he can’t believe the sheer crazed ambition of it. Let’s just see if we’ve got this right: #Unravel is a mechanical art installation. It’s based around a selection of ten 7-inch records chosen by writer and former Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat, who has compiled an autobiographical story to go with each. When the viewer plays one of these records, it sets off both the song being played by pre-programmed acoustic instruments around the room and a recording of Moffat’s story. Which story we hear and the tone of the music played depends on the “mood” of the machine.

“Yep,” laughs Perman, “that’s right, that’s exactly it. You’ve got it.” That sounds incredibly complicated to design and build. “It was, but what we’re really keen on is that people don’t think about that when they come to see it, that they’re not too caught up in how it works. As with all of FOUND’s installations we want to hide the technology and for people to listen to Aidan’s stories first and foremost.”

Perman says the short answer why this collaboration happened was that he saw an invitation to submit ideas for Creative Scotland’s Vital Spark funding at the tail end of 2010 – a scheme which seeks to pair artists from different disciplines in order to create new works.

“The long answer is that we came up with a completely different idea first,” he says, “which fell by the wayside. Me and Ziggy [Campbell, also of FOUND] were in the pub afterwards, as is customary where most of our new ideas are concerned, discussing who in Scotland we’d most like to collaborate with. We quickly decided that Aidan was one of them, and now we were signed to Chemikal Underground (also Moffat’s label) we had a route to approach him.”

Moffat recalls being enthused about the project right away: “When Ziggy first got in touch about it, I had been reading a lot of avant garde literature. Things like the French Oulipo writers (whose late-20th-century works would be written under the constraints of playful and arbitrary textual rules) and BS Johnston, the experimental writer. So it was something I really wanted to do. At the end of the conversation I agreed to it, regardless of the mammoth task I knew it was going to end up being.”

After Moffat came on board in the beginning of 2011 he had to write ten stories, one for each of the songs he had chosen, and then three more variations on each to reflect the changing moods of #Unravel, which is another bewildering concept. How does a machine know what mood it’s in?

“The weather affects it,” says Moffat. “If it’s sunny or rainy, that affects the story I tell. Another factor is the watershed – everything after four o’clock is a wee bit racier, a wee bit more risqué. That’s when the children should be out of the room. What else? The audience – if there’s a lot of people in the room, the way I tell the story becomes a bit more enthusiastic, a bit more boisterous, or if there’s only one or two it’s a bit more intimate and calm.

“The fourth factor is confidence. People can write about it on Twitter (hence the hashtag in the name), so if you say something nasty about it there it’ll be in a very bad mood and that’ll affect the version of the story you get, or if it’s in a good mood it’ll be confident and chirpy.”

That last factor in particular defines #Unravel as a kind of more advanced version of Cybraphon, the “emotional jukebox” FOUND designed that was a hit at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival (once again they’ve been supported by the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Design Informatics in the construction of #Unravel, as well as by Vital Spark and New Media Scotland’s Alt-w Fund).

“Cybraphon was a moody, fame-obsessed robot,” says Perman, “which would respond to the masses and what they were saying about it online. #Unravel isn’t like that, it cares about what the last person said about it and that’s all. We’re trying to recreate the experience of how it is to speak to one person and how their feedback affects what you’re saying.”

#Unravel also relates to FOUND’s previous multimedia project The End of Forgetting, which was about the fact that information posted online is virtually impossible to erase. “It was about the implications of living your life online,” he says, “and the inhuman version of memory that exists there. Whereas #Unravel represents a more human interpretation of memory, where it isn’t fixed, and the number of times you remember something warps it. There’s no definitive version of events.”

Moffat laughs when asked what sort of memories he’s dredged up. “Ah, you see I can’t tell you that,” he says, “because then you’ll know which versions of the stories are true.” The songs weren’t chosen on grounds of taste, he says (he thought of Chris De Burgh’s Lady in Red during that initial conversation with Campbell; Tom Waits’ Downtown Train, the Ronettes’ When I Saw You, the Cure’s Pictures of You and James’ Sit Down also appear), but because of the specific memories they conjured for him.

“I always write about girls,” says Moffat, “and I was going to try and avoid it, but it soon became apparent that for me, music is intrinsically connected to romance. Every time I was thinking about these records it would always be something to do with a girl. I’d like to think that most people feel the same way, that music means a lot to them and that it’s usually connected to memories of… well, shagging.” He laughs.

There are plans, says Perman, to expand #Unravel into an iPhone app or even a live performance if they can find some way to do it that “isn’t cheesy”. So not, he agrees, like the live music version of one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. For now, though it’s sharing a Glasgow International bill with fellow musicians-turned-artists like ex-members of Mother and the Addicts and Uncle John & Whitelock.

“I know the Art School union was a hub for a lot of creative people to meet,” says Moffat. “Everybody went to nights like Andrew Divine’s [Divine!, now at the Admiral Bar]. So it’s only natural that artists would end up forming bands and vice versa. Half the bands in Glasgow were art students at one point.”

• #Unravel is at SWG3, Glasgow, from 20 April to 7 May. www.unravelproject.com, www.glasgowinternational.org