Ken Butler Hybrid Instruments

My hybrid musical instrument sculptures, collage/drawings, performances, and audio-visual installations explore the interaction and transformation of objects, sounds, and altered images as function and form collide in the intersection of art and music. A spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility attempts to reveal hidden meanings and associations, momentarily creating 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. Keyboards become cybernetic architecture. Anxious objects speak in tongues.
Contemporary urban life is a bewildering collage of multiple images, ideas, sounds, and objects in a constant state of flux as information overload becomes the touchstone of our age. As we move from the mechanical to the electrical, this churning mass chews up and spits out material with re-assigned priorities and updates. The resulting detritus is a living corpse – a random and chaotic body of juxtaposed and deconstructed items and associations. From this storehouse of forsaken objects and hardware I, the urban bricoleur, further dismantle and reassemble the consumer society into functional assemblages in the form of musical instrument/objects, then coax them to sing for their supper.