Found in Translation

In the same way a jazz standard is never played the same twice, what if a standard set of machines were created, facilitating the construction of a different club each year?

Hastings Jazz Club proposes to run a series of concerts taking place inside a new auditorium each year made from translations of clubs across the U.K. A jazz exchange. The auditorium is not a perfect copy of those clubs, but rather a rewording of the clubs within the beach itself. The inevitable fuzziness in translation providing a new architecture, despite bearing spatial resemblance to the clubs it is rewording.

To create the new club there is a set of translators (machines) each with a specific role in the construction of the bungaroosh translations. Where there would be a chair in The Jazz Crypt is a subtle mound, perfect to perch on. Once the season is over, a glass cast is taken of a specific section of the auditorium, which is then added to the stage. The clubs are left to be weathered by the Hastings seaside, breaking apart due to the poor resilience of bungaroosh. The next year the process of translation begins again, the same translators, but a new source material and a new club.

Glass Casts

The site is constantly being inscribed, by fishing boats and the bulldozers that push them into the sea. These temporary marks left in the beach were translated, using a CNC and a sandpit, into a series of permanent, unique glass panels.

Club Translations

Using the CNC translation technique, developed with the previous glass casts, rewordings of different jazz clubs were made. Both the positive and the negatives of the sand-casting process being used to create the auditorium for the new club.

The Translators

Top – Cultivator: Pours the hydraulic lime and mixes the shingle to cast bungaroosh.
Middle – Mill: Rewords the jazz clubS into the wet bungaroosh.
Bottom – Glass Caster: Casts a specific section of the auditorium in glass at the end of the season.

The Translators On Site

Left: The main chassis collecting its translation equipment.
Middle: The Glass Caster taking a cast of the negative rewording of Ronnie Scott’s.
Right: The Mill incrementally rewording the Jazz Crypt into the beach.

Off and On Season Sections

Top: A section through the beach before the jazz season. Eroded parts of previous clubs stored archeologically, a few being used by the public.
Bottom: A section through a concert at the Jazz Club, with people sitting on rewordings of other clubs.