Rory Buckley’s installations combine sculpture, performance, movement and space, as well as, an explosive curiosity for the boundaries of sound. After exhibiting in Southbank’s Royal Festival Hall earlier this year, STYX Project presents his first solo show in London.

When did your fascination with the interplay of sound and visual art begin?

I started on a different route. I’d gone to college to do computer programming and then about 5 or 6 years ago I started making a lot of paper collage. I think that was good practice to try and find my aesthetic in term of how it was going to work because it was collecting, procreation, re-appropriation and all of these kinds of things which, I’m still dealing with now in different ways.

Also, I’ve always been interested in films and watching a lot of TV programmes from when I was younger. I started with Hollywood and then as the years went on, I turned to more European film with German directors like Herzog and Fassbinder.

Were you interested in music?

I was into music a lot from when I was in my teens and it was always more experimental. I tried to learn instruments but it wasn’t really something I was too interested in enough to become good at. So then I began DJing which I still treat now like playing an instrument when you are playing turntables or beat mixing.

I got into Plunderphonics which comes from hip-hop when they first started taking samples from other people’s tracks and then re-looping them as their own. I wanted to do sound collage and make a soundscape. It didn’t have to make any sense but I basically took 3500 mp3s and put them into small segments and then layered them on top of each other.

Plunderphonics is sometimes called Audio Piracy, do you have to consider copyright laws in your works?

It seems to be something that comes up more with visuals rather than sound which I find a bit odd. It’s the same thing really; you’ll taking somebody else’s work and then changing it. The copyright thing is something that would affect all of my work apart from the sculptural installations. Although it’s still there in a way because I’m using records; I melt records into shapes and then display them as my own work.

How do you decide which materials to use? Obviously in Sonic Rolling Ball Machine, the use of records has a cross over between sound and something becoming visual.

That was exactly the starting point to use records and to try to give them a new direction. I’m especially trying to find records that are no longer wanted by anyone. You know the ones that even charity shops can’t sell. You always find a Shaky Stevens or the same Human League record. It’s something that I am exploring and vinyl is great because it is so fast as well. Once you do it, you’ve got about 10-15 seconds to mould it into a shape and then that’s it. Or you can always put it back in the oven and it will be malleable again.

I’ve noticed that you also use percussion instruments but not necessarily in an orthodox way and there is a deliberate reference to conventional music.

I started researching rolling ball sculptures and there weren’t any that were focusing on sound. And then I wanted to try and explore a John Cage-on aspect. A lot of people who have heard and seen the piece have asked me if I have designed some rhythm into it. I’m purposely trying to suggest that I have although the composition is completely random and unique every time.

I started with music notation stands and I was fascinated with them because straight away, without even doing anything, it related to classical music. I wanted to try to give them a new function and make them into instruments themselves; not specifically for making notational music but just for making sound. Then I started exploring with 5 or 6 of them and it became a sort of a mini orchestra.

From the re-appropriated materials you use, I expected Sonic Rolling Ball Machine to sound clumsy or shrill but it’s actually very delicate and pleasant to listen to. How do viewers typically react to the piece?

There have been different sorts of reaction; some where they are trying to figure out how it was working or how the balls were perpetually travelling around the track and a lot of people just couldn’t stop laughing. Sometimes, some of the balls would come off the track and run around the floor and that became a really strong interactive part of the work. People were fighting to try and get the balls and put them back onto their tracks.

It seems to be an exciting time for sound art with Susan Philipsz being short-listed for the Turner Prize. Also over the last year we have seen the likes of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s installation with finches and electric guitar at the Barbican and John Wynne’s piece in the Saatchi Gallery.

It is slowing starting to get more interesting in the art scene even though sound art has been around for a long time. I don’t even know if I’m really into that definition because I’m trying to deal with all different ways of approaching art. So with this whole process, my way of thinking is not to be bias towards any sense. I’m interested in touch and smell as well but sound is something that I am trying to fight for in a way.

I like the wealth of cultural referencing that occurs throughout your works. In the video installation Nausea, you combine the literature of Sartre with old film clips.

There were a couple of angles on that. The reason I mentioned Sartre was because there was a character in the book called the Autodidact. He basically started reading all the books in the library from A-Z so that all of the books’ knowledge became his own. I was interested in society’s lust for knowledge and the amount of information that is out there. Apart of the piece is to do with heavy research and questioning my own research. It was interesting as well that when people viewed the screens, it became almost like a game show. I didn’t intend it so much but I realised that would be a part of making the Nausea piece. People were saying, “What’s that film?” and it was almost like I was teasing them.

With Jean Baudrillard, I was also interested in mass consumerism. I got a present of the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die and I wanted to talk about these types of books as a parody of mass-consumerism in the same way as these compendiums are everywhere. There is this list and I wanted to question who made it and why is this the list? I basically started ticking them off. I’ve probably seen 600 of them out of the whole book. That’s the way I do things; it’s collecting again just like how I started with paper collage.

Rory Buckley: 741 mph was at the STYX Project London from 12th-20th November 2010. Find out more @ The Short Wave, http://theshortwave.blogspot.com