Lyraei is a musical instrument of this kind by Mihalis Shammas. It is a chordophone with magnetic pulses that excite the strings so that they vibrate continuously.
Lyraei – Mihalis Shammas – Intimate Open Studios #2 from iii on Vimeo.
In these (electro-acoustic) compositions, Endean combines the sound of her clarinet with various sounds from her archive, microtonal humming, Leslie speakers ( ‘as a way to spin my bass clarinet around the microphones’), e-bows, magnets, binaural microphone feedback, and field recordings.
When artists like Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg were filling rooms with bizarro installations composed of tires, knickknacks, and trash, Paik was utilizing TV monitors, whose images he would torque into abstractions using magnets. TV was a new technology at the time, and Paik’s was a new kind of art, so naturally, it confused almost everyone. To many critics at the time, his shows seemed like nothing more than rooms full of broken TVs.
Paik was short-circuiting a form of media associated with a one-way stream of information. Here’s how Paik once described his works involving televisual material: “I use technology in order to hate it properly.” Consider this film a reminder that, barring only Jean-Luc Godard, no other 20th-century artist was better at speaking about their work using pithy one-liners.