Airplayers Limited Edition, 1990
This is a translation of Armstrong’s site-specific installations into a bookwork consisting of the AIRPLAYERS book, a video tape documenting the artist’s AIRPLAYER X installation, and a unique sculptural environment that ‘performs’ in a 90 second cycle of light, color, and sound.
The piece is arranged to transform the viewer into a participant who unfolds, discloses and activates the work. The components are contained in a handcrafted vinyl box, with an image on the front cover and with silkscreened title on front cover and spine. On the inside front cover is an original sandblasted drawing on plastic.
Edition of 65
Case: handcrafted vinyl, cloth, exterior window with acetate image and reflective lens, holds Airplayers book and video of Airplayer X
Environment: Silicon forms, optical lens, sandblasted plastic, graphite drawing overlay, incandescent and LED lights, synchronous digitized sound; switch allows viewer to activate a microchip that controls both light and sound
Manuel: Transparent paper and cream vellum in a transparent envelope
Size: 11″ × 13″× 6″
Willis, Locker & Owens, NY
Press:
HIGH PERFORMANCE
Airplayers: A New Book Form Born of Technology by Judith Hoffberg, 1990
When Art meets Technology and the marriage works, the magic can hardly be contained. So we have in Airplayers by Sara Garden Armstrong a remarkable translation of a large sculptural environment into a book, a video, and a reduced-in-scale sculptural environment housed in a handcrafted box. Just when you thought that everything that could be done with a book has been done, something comes along to make you stand up in amazement. And Airplavers does amaze in so many ways.
Time, transformation and movement are consistent in Armstrong's art and to translate these themes into photographic documentation would have been self-defeating. Instead, the artist has sought to translate time, space, evolution, and repetition as well as kinetic sound sculptures into the three-dimensional book medium. To have succeeded in creating a new bookform, one that has the dynamics of all those themes, makes this book experience different from all others. Read More