Wearable Sculpture by Nick Cave (But No, Not That Nick Cave) Invade Microsoft

Don’t get too excit­ed, Bad Seeds fans — although, come to think of it, you might rea­son­ably get excit­ed any­way at these “sound­suits,” craft­ed by the oth­er Nick Cave, a dancer and visu­al artist. The brief video above, from Cave’s show Meet Me at the End of the Earth last year at the Seat­tle Art Muse­um, gives you an idea of what these things look like and how they move. Using a near-bewil­der­ing vari­ety of strik­ing tex­tures and uncon­ven­tion­al com­po­nents — “sand­wich bags, spin­ning tops and cro­cheted doilies” get spe­cif­ic men­tions — Cave crafts sev­er­al lay­ers of visu­al inter­est inside which to place a par­tic­u­lar­ly adven­tur­ous mod­ern dancer. Seat­tle Art Muse­um cura­tor Pam McClusky describes the sound­suits as “a cross between Car­ni­val, Lib­er­ace, Shon­i­bare, Cock­ney, haute cou­ture and African cer­e­mo­ny.” To say the least.

View­ing Cave’s sound­suits in a muse­um set­ting is one thing; wit­ness­ing them in action out in the wild is quite anoth­er. As long as we’re talk­ing about the greater Puget Sound area, play the video just above and watch a squadron of sound­suit-clad dancers invade Microsoft. One can hard­ly imag­ine a stark­er clash than Cave’s aes­thet­ic of patch­work flam­boy­ance and the Microsoft cam­pus, that locus clas­si­cus of the slick­ly beige Pacif­ic North­west high-tech nineties. But for an even more fas­ci­nat­ing artis­tic con­trast, I say we put an end to the name-relat­ed con­fu­sion and unite this Nick Cave in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the brood­ing Aus­tralian singer-song­writer. Until that comes togeth­er, fans of one Cave can vis­it the oth­er’s Sound­suit Shop to gath­er the mate­ri­als for their own mash-up.

via Metafil­ter

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.