Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Ken Butler's Sprinkler

Posted by Jon in • Crazy Guitar Designs

Ken Butler Sprinkler
I stumbled upon Ken Butler while on my quest to find Crazy Guitar Designs but his website showed mainly violins and cellos, so I contacted Ken and he kindly sent me the “Sprinkler guitar” (left).

”The Sprinkler Guitar was created in the early 90’s by modifying an old electric with miscellaneous metal objects (including a lawn sprinkler) and a focus on visual design rather than functional qualities. In addition, I made a bass and another guitar in a similar style to give the “band” a unified metal/techno look.”

”Ken Butler’s hybrid musical instrument sculptures, collage/drawings, performances, and audio-visual installations explore the interaction and transformation of common and uncommon objects, sounds, and altered images as function and form collide in the intersections of art and music. Created primarily from urban detritus, the hybrid instruments express a poetic spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility as hidden meanings and associations momentarily create a striking and re-animated cultural identity for common objects. String instruments become body, tool, weapon, toy, symbol, machine, phallus, creature, sculpture, icon, and voice. Pianos and keyboards become cybernetic and symbolic architecture. Anxious objects speak in tongues.

Bridging fine art, craft, technology, and music, the hybrids exist as ergonomic functional musical instruments as well as sculpture; they are constructed from readily available consumer objects designed to perform a different function, and when amplified are shaped with cutting-edge sound processing allowing artful musical sounds and expression.

The guitar most specifically can be viewed as a potent social (and even religious) symbolic icon linked to much of the psychic upheaval in our culture; it still dominates rebellious experimental music and is a potent androgynous image for the female form, male phallus, and hand-held weapon. Sex and death, and a formula for a post-apocalyptic reconstruction.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself… so I didn’t, thanks Ken for sharing your amazing artwork instruments and creative philosophies.

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Ovidiu - GuitarFlame.com on 03/12 at 05:11 PM

This guitar actually plays or is just a post-modernist art form?

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