Song: Speaker Man Speaketh
Song: Drip Man's Gotta Fat Lip

Lyrics for: Drip Man's Gotta Fat Lip
Lyrics for: Speaker Man Speaketh

lyrics by:Bercowetz/Bua
music: David Fox

From a Drip to a Speak and Back Again             

Bercowetz / Bua   2006

University Museum at Albany, NY

Who Would Win between Drip Man and Speaker Man?  Someone recently asked.
Well it all depends… Speaker Man being a desperate lumbering techno monster has the power to detonate all of his nuclear force at once, possibly knocking the earth off it’s axis and sending the meager planet for a wild ride into deep space death.

On the other hand if the human race successfully exterminates itself first.
Drip Man would have no problem sludging his way into the future, drooling right past the crusty remnants of Speaker Man.

But as for a cartoon like small-scale Rock’em Sock’em bout, Drip Man would probably have little problem spooging all over and shorting out poor Speaker Man.
Speaker Man really gets points for His Trojan Horse like surprise attack.
Late at night while the folks of earth are sleeping the magnetic field is severely turned up.
Thus drawing towards it all that stereo equipment which lays in the trash and things that ain’t tied down. As the thing becomes more sure footed and the wires are connected...the thing gets out of hand.  We realize what’s upon us a little too late

The space under the staircase and the trap door with a lift into the basement’s tunnel system are the kind of locations that are usually not considered conducive to exhibiting art but more for storing away items that one does not want others to see. For us this was a great opportunity to build an interior addition to the museum. While opening up a slew metaphors. Stories of creation and destruction of humanity combined with the control room of a mad man whether Bin Ladin in his “cave fortress” or Giuliani in  WTC 7. Fiction and reality collide information is dismembered, reconfigured and sloppily stored away.

The staircase begins to de-construct or rather is consumed by the bulging- vibrating structure.

The stair case, proactive, divides the piece. To the right: the beginning of man, whether Big Bang, Creationism, Intelligent Design, Darwinism or Catastrophic Evolution. In this scenario it all begins with a drip, the green side is inhabited by drip men, spewing and multiplying…  You can enter the organic growth as if your body is lancing a boil or a goiter that has sprouted from the architecture of the building. On the interior sludge, oil, blood, excrement,  placenta course though the circulatory system of the piece. Bruno Bozzetto’s  -Allegro Non Troppo- Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet plays on a near by monitor.

To the left you see the past present technology. It appears in the form of live sound and radio manipulation telegraphed to speakers towering up the exterior where speaker man sits. His magnetism pulling all the discarded technology his way.

Daniel Hopsicker's interview with Amanda Keller can be seen and heard describing her relationship to Mohammad Atta, while the unexplained 911 incident is re-evaluated. There are many unanswered questions. Does Al-Qaeda really exist? What kind of disco is
Bin Laden operating in his cave system and what about Giuliani’ s control room in WTC 7. Its hard to know, we’ve only seen diagrams, any evidence has been blown to smithereens.

You hear the story of both Drip Man and Speaker Man as performed by world-renowned song poet David Fox. Along with the philosophical murmurings of Sontag, Baudrillard, and Virilio mix with the voice of WTC lease holder Daniel Silverstein  to create a  sound scape of uncertainty,  deception, naïve fear, intellectual oblivion and  strategically controlled chaos.

Bridging the two polarities is a viewing station. You can get a glimps of the under world- the bowels of the museum, smoke rises and the rock of many faces hovers suspended over a pile of body parts. The last remains of humanity- history repeats and as the speakers and the drips pile up so do the body parts all is well, all is normal during the time of Drip Man and Speaker Man.