The car is a drone environment: a place where drones are produced and experienced. I suspect that this characteristic of cars has played a significant role in shaping the way that music is designed for and heard in cars. I decided to use La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's drone-based sound installation, the Dream House, as a point of comparison. By installing a Dream House-like environment in my car, I was able to compare my experiences of engine sounds and traffic and pop music with a deliberately-crafted drone environment.
By bringing this drone installation into a common drone environment, I hope to illuminate drone sounds as an important element of the built environment and to begin a new conversation about their use and the way they influence the experience of space and time.
I also thought it would be a fun challenge - considering La Monte Young's apparent hesitancy towards distributing his work - to make a "compressed" copy of the Dream House to share with others. In this light, Dream Car is a celebration of La Monte Young's work and a sincere attempt at sharing it with those who have not yet visisted the Dream House.
Dream Car was first shown at Foo Fest 2009 in Providence, RI. Megan Elias helped with the installation.
Dream Car was shown again at Proteus Gowanus as part of their 2009 TRANSPORT theme on October 10, 2009.
The poster for the Tom Cruise movie "Days of Thunder" is an early precedent for combining a Zazeela-like magenta palette to the theme of cars:
There have been other dream cars before Dream Car. For instance, in 1975, the Ant Farm collective created the Phantom Dream Car, which was driven into a wall of TVs. Ant Farm also created many works that explore (and parody) the relationship between music and cars (World's Longest Bridge, Car-men in Sydney).
