tony B: the overlook remix
2008 | Audio & video for iPod | car battery | photomural | wood panels | audio speakers | cast silicon | perspex | Caspar Thorn as Danny (video) & Tony Biggs as Tony (audio) | 27.08.08 - 17.09.08
Produced for Rise and Fall:
Curtain House Elevator, Melbourne
A series of projects curated in 2008
by David McDonald & Chris Barton
In Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of The Shining (1980), the little boy Danny has an invisible friend named Tony who lives in Danny's mouth. To differentiate between himself and Tony, Danny modulates his own voice and animates a finger to indicate the change of persona. In an early scene, Danny stands at the bathroom mirror pleading with the prophetic Tony to tell him why he doesn't want to go to the Overlook Hotel for the winter until it is revealed through the vision of a torrent of blood exiting an elevator. Tony's outpouring on everything wrong with the world in the past, present and future seems to extend indefinitely within Tony B: the Overlook Remix.
Tony's stream of consciousness is in fact the mixed and modulated voice of radio personality Tony Biggs to sound like a creepy little boy. Tony begins his weekly talk-back based program On the Blower [102.7 FM Triple RRR Friday 9am- 12pm] somewhat provocatively with the end theme music from the movie Talk Radio (1988) in which a Talkback Radio Star is assassinated by a disagreeable listener.
Tony Biggs has a certain distaste for the iPod revolution in which human interactivity is missing, his lingering presence as such within the installation is therefore something of a misnomer—as a lost voice from the other side, the residue of his weekly search for a "spirited discussion" is presented as an uneasy stand-in for elevator music.
Melbourne Age
Visual Arts Reviews,
P. 32, Preview Magazine
31st August 2008
by Penny Modra
Kieran Boland's installation in the Curtin House Lift is not confusing, but it is multi-layered. A far cry from the usual, lift-based inventory of individuals who can be contacted for a root, it asks more of your brain than a standard, six floor journey actually allows. Inspired by Kubrick's The Shining, an iPod video loop begins with cinema's iconic lift movement: the wave of blood crashing into the foyer of The Overlook Hotel. Danny's alter ego, Tony, talks as a child's finger waggles. The walls of the lift are wallpapered with a panorama of Montana's Glacier National Park (through which Jack navigated the VW). But the voice of Tony is actually the voice of Triple R's Tony Biggs, pitched up to 140%. Everyone's trapped! Biggs in the iPod, Tony in the finger, you in the lift. And any new graffiti will take on a certain "Redrum" menace. Worth a minimum of three visits this week.