Photo: Pawel Hubert Haraszkiewicz (2021)
Richard Crow – The Institution of Rot: Enacting Decay (A Sonic Un-Archiving) or Good Decompositions
Proposal
For Attack Decay Sustain Release, Richard Crow will activate a one-week sound installation and live action events/tour/and a talk that include selected objects, tapes, and “performance remains” from the Institution of Rot Archive—a 30-year body of work concerned with noise, decay, and the aesthetics of destruction. Rather than presenting the archive as a static collection (although there will be plenty of dust), this project treats it as a living, volatile system: material that continues to transform physically and sonically over time.
The installation will use the gallery as a temporary sonic laboratory, where analogue playback devices, contact microphones, electromagnetic pickups and decaying media (tape loops, damaged cassettes, unstable objects) generate unpredictable noise events. Sound is produced not through composition, but through material decomposition—tape shedding, feedback, friction, hum, and mechanical failure etc. These unstable processes embody the ADSR envelope in real time: attack as rupture, decay as material loss, sustain as drone or malfunction, release as ‘disappearance’.
Throughout the week, I will work on site, making the process visible: repairing, modifying, and “un-archiving” objects through performance. Visitors will be invited to listen closely, manipulate elements of the setup, and become co-producers of noise, highlighting listening as an embodied and participatory act.
A live performance/activation on Friday will collapse old and new work through sound collage, re-enactment and analogue techniques from my practice (loops, cut-ups, live tape manipulation). Sonic captions—short recorded responses to images and objects—will offer additional entry points for audiences.
PRESS RELEASE (Variations exist)
FOR IMMEDIATE DISSEMINATION
Title: THE INSTITUTION OF ROT: ENACTING DECAY (A SONIC UN‑ARCHIVING)
Subtitle: GOOD DECOMPOSITIONS
This spring, the stanleypickergallery will not host an exhibition.
It will decompose one.
The Institution of Rot: Enacting Decay (A Sonic Un‑Archiving) detonates the boundary between archive, performance, ruin, and machine. For one week, visitors will step into a functioning organism of failure: a site where thirty years of tapes, objects, dust, and “performance remains” refuse to stay still, refuse to be catalogued, and refuse to die quietly.
The project hijacks the logic of the archive and subjects it to time, friction, heat, entropy, and touch. Analogue devices—degraded, unstable, stubbornly alive—will grind, slip, shed, whirr, distort, and collapse in real time. Tape will misbehave. Machines will sulk. Feedback will assert itself. The system will not remain polite.
Sound here is not “composed”: it leaks.
It erodes.
It mutinies.
The ADSR envelope becomes a biological impulse: attack as rupture; decay as shedding and loss; sustain as malfunctioning drone; release as disappearance into the noise floor. Every moment is temporary. Every signal risks extinction.
Throughout the week, the artist will inhabit the space, performing acts of repair, sabotage, adjustment, and resurrection. These daily interventions—half performance, half maintenance ritual—expose the archive as a volatile ecosystem, not a museum coffin. Visitors are not passive observers; they may touch, adjust, provoke, and collaborate with the machines, becoming complicit in the unfolding disintegration.
On Friday, the installation spills over into a live activation: a collision of past and present works, performed through analogue methods—cut‑ups, tape looping, live tape manipulation, degraded playback, and the choreography of breakdown. The event folds decades of material back into the present, refusing chronology and refusing closure.
“Sonic captions”—short recorded responses to particular objects and images—offer sideways access points: part reflection, part confession, part interference pattern.
The Institution of Rot: Enacting Decay (A Sonic Un‑Archiving) is not a celebration of destruction per se..
It is an experiment in persistence, transformation, and the generative power of things that will not stay fixed.
Decay doesn’t end the work.
Decay is the work.
Programme (in progress)
Day 3 Thursday 19 March 2026 12pm Listening to The Institution of Rot – A Short History of Decay.
Richard Crow in conversation with Dr Leah Kardos. Richard Crow is a PhD candidate at the School of Art, Kingston University. Leah Kardos is a Senior Lecturer in music at Kingston School of Art and the Director of the Visconti Studio at Kingston University.
Day 4 Friday 20 March 2026 3pm Pay our respects to the Vultures for they are your future…
Live accompaniment (micro-performance) by Richard Crow for the film Towers of Silence (1975)
Stanley Picker Gallery
Kingston University London
Kingston School of Art
Grange Road
Kingston upon Thames
KT1 2QJ
stanleypickergallery@kingston.ac.uk
INSTITUTION OF ROT 