Don Stinson
Overview
This art installation by Don Stinson consists of two parts - a large wall painting of an abandoned drive-in theater and in front of the painting, a speaker stand from a drive-in theater. In the original installation, the artist had employed an audio cassette deck with a small transmitter and receiver to play environmental sounds through the speakers. Unfortunately, the system was unreliable and required constantly battery changes to stay operative for more than a few days at a time.
In the new installation, we replaced and rewired the internal speakers, converted the old audio to mp3, rewired the installation with flat speaker wire (less than 1/16″ thick) and set up a mac mini to play the audio. The computer is configured to automatically restart after a power failure and because the audio is now digital, it can replaced if there’s ever a hardware failure, eliminating the dependency on the original audio tape. Also, because of the new speakers, the sound is louder and clearer and can be heard in a busy gallery. Amazingly, the flat speaker wire, which was painted to match the wood grain floor, is virtually undetectable.
This was my favorite piece in the DAM when I visited the new addition recently. Having grown-up in Nebraska, where my home town had a drive-in theater, and having lived in Arizona and Colorado, where the typography depicted in the piece, it really spoke to me. The addition of the audio was memorizing as the speakers just brought it all to life. I expected a popcorn box to come blowing along the ground at any second. I would love to be able to have reproduction of the work.