Month: August 2011

Sound artist Rutger Zuydervelt and designer Gerco Hiddink have teamed up to organize a new audio project called Bridges.

[Image: From Bridges].

The project asked a group of eight well-known improvisational musicians to “react” to four Dutch bridges (or, more accurately, to field recordings made on, under, and near those bridges). The project is thus as much about musical improv as it is about infrastructural acoustics—a structural ecology of sound vibrantly humming in the spaces around us.

[Images: From Bridges].

As The Wire explains in a short article about the project, Zuydervelt and Hiddink “paired the eight musicians not to play together, but to react separately to the field recordings, which he then mixed together with the primary field recordings.”

The resulting sound works have just been released, and can be previewed here.

[Image: Album design by Gerco Hiddink for Bridges].

As it happens, there’s a surprisingly strong artistic interest in turning bridges into sound.

A few years ago, for instance, a project called “Singing Bridges” made the news. It was “a sonic sculpture, playing the cables of stay-cabled and suspension bridges as musical instruments,” and the artist behind it—Jodi Rose—wrote that she aimed to “amplify and record the sound of bridge cables around the world.”

Artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, meanwhile, explored the acoustics of an urban bridge with their project “Harmonic Bridge” (which I had the pleasure of hearing during its run at MASS MoCA). That project, as the museum explained it, produced a roiling “eddy of sound in the midst of intersecting streams of traffic. Cars pass by heading north or south on Marshall Street and east or west on the Route 2 bridge, but this linear motion is counterpoised by a rolling, humming C as calming as the rhythm of ocean waves.”

More broadly, the artists add, “The bridge becomes an instrument played by the city revealing hidden harmonies within the built environment.”

[Image: “Harmonic Bridge” by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, courtesy of MASS MoCA].

Releasing drone-bursts, buzzes, rumbles, and bells, bridges are the ignored instruments of the city, strongly suggesting that the urban context so often prized by architects and designers should also include an awareness of that region’s acoustics—a neighborhood zoned for singing bridges and harmonic roads, given rhythm by the thumping and amplified tectonics of the subways. The bridge becomes an Aeolian harp—infrastructure gone acoustic—its formal sonic properties activated by the turbulent motions of the environment around it.

(Environmental sounds elsewhere: Dancing About Architecture).

[Image: Via Jim Rossignol/Big Robot].

“Having stripped everything out of game two, except the terrain,” game developer Jim Rossignol recently tweeted, “we again are left with a geometric painterliness. I am actually happy just wandering around these spaces, discovering extraordinary formations and unexpected floating mesas.”

[Image: A satellite view of the corporate water feature become roadway hazard thanks to a landscaping crew in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania].

Out in the suburbs, where we’ve temporarily taken up shop on our way to New York City, the damage of Hurricane Irene has mostly been limited to large fallen branches on wooded roads, with the necessary but unexpected orange cones, caution tape, wrongway turns, and over-hill detours associated with such minor obstacles.

Is there an oral history of road detours—the friends met, the appointments missed, the geographies discovered—and, if not, should one be written?

But I was thrilled by the oddly Ballardian experience today of driving around on a spectacular and cloudless post-storm evening to see that two landscapers working overtime had begun to pump the flooded excess from an artificial corporate lake—a kind of ornamental moat surrounding an office complex in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania—directly onto the street.

Cars were braking and swerving out of their lanes as the roadway flooded, and this doubly-fake water feature visibly bloated, engulfing two lanes of traffic, even as the artificial lake from whence it came seemed to recede, deflating back to preplanned limits amidst the sculpted hills and parking lots.

[Image: Photo by Chris Woebken, from his Flickr account].

I’m sitting out the winds of Hurricane Irene in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where the basement of this house is starting to flood, a siren is going off somewhere, and the power has flickered off—and on, and off, and on—for the last hour, though the full brunt of the storm has yet to hit.

But everything I own is in a creekside storage depot in Queens, as we wait to move into our new place next week; I’m thus finding it hard to fall asleep thinking of the fact that we’ve moved back to the east coast just in time, potentially, to have everything ruined and swept away into an industrial canal in New York City. But that’s the way things go.
   [Image: Photo by Chris Woebken, from his Flickr account].

In any case, artist Chris Woebken, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working as part of the Landscape Futures exhibition over in Reno, has been posting some photos today, showing New York City on lockdown, with plywood walls appearing in what once were windows and new facades popping up in a flash atop old storefronts.

Extreme weather brings its own architectural ornament, a whole family of plug-in and bolt-on designs that would otherwise have lain dormant as everyday materials, sleeping on the shelves of Home Depot.

The photos in this post are by Chris Woebken, and are taken from his Flickr account.
   [Image: Photo by Chris Woebken, from his Flickr account].

But being back out in the suburbs of my teenage years—and hurriedly evacuating the family basement—also means that I’ve stumbled upon a bunch of old books, and it seems vaguely appropriate to quote a brief excerpt from a poem by John Balaban.

Balaban treats the impending weather above him as a kind of aerial organism, a gargantuan meteorology of displaced marine life passing ominously through the sky:

Toward dawn, two nimbus clouds drifted in,
the larger—trailing down tendrils of rain
like a Portuguese man-o’-war—began to pulse
with lightning, brightening its belly like a huge lantern,
arcing a jagged streak
to ignite the smaller cloud.
Pulsing and flaring, striking each other,
dragging the earth with rain,
they drifted off over the mountains.
All about them the sky was clear.

The storm is a memorable presence, entering lives and leaving again, both animate and terrible.

[Image: LEVEL 1 from “Theriomorphous Cyborg” by Simone Ferracina].

Last week, while I was lost in the process of moving east from Los Angeles to New York City, the Animal Architecture Awards were announced, a design competition for which I was proud to serve on the jury.

I’ll be posting at least two of the projects here, starting with what was ultimately the competition winner: a project called “Theriomorphous Cyborg” by Simone Ferracina.

[Image: LEVEL 2 from “Theriomorphous Cyborg” by Simone Ferracina].

Ferracina’s project takes “a bewildering non-human gaze and the mysterious worlds it may engender” as its starting point, effectively plugging human beings into animal technologies, devices of transformative spatial cognition.

“Set in a near-future environment teeming with locative media, sensors and portable devices and co-constructed by virtual objects and information overlays,” Ferracina writes, “the project aims to establish and activate new relations between human cyborgs and their ‘sentient’ environment. The animal Umwelt becomes a metaphor for designing and opening up new perceptual realities and fields of experience—and reach previously invisible worlds.”

[Image: LEVELS 3-4 from “Theriomorphous Cyborg” by Simone Ferracina].

In this sense the project is similar in spirit to “Animal Superpowers” by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada—now on display at the Nevada Museum of Art as part of Landscape Futures—but it is also not strictly speaking architectural.

Concerned more with space itself—that is, with the spatiality of sensing: how animal bodies perceive, navigate, and interactively change their environments—the augmented sensory overlays of “Theriomorphous Cyborg” nonetheless instigate transformations in the urban terrains within which they function.

The project is designed as a game, complete with different sensory “levels.” Quoting at length:

Inspired by migratory birds and their ability to perceive the Earth’s magnetism, LEVEL 1 superimposes the participant’s field of vision with an additional signal consisting of directional color patterns. The gamer learns to navigate space according to his/her own magnetic compass. LEVEL 2 overlays synchronous retinal signals with asynchronous digital recordings, thus causing time to appear fluid and heterogeneous. Upon reaching LEVEL 3, all direct visual reception is shut off. Participants engage their surroundings relying entirely on the broadcast of cyborgian “eyes”—a network of hacked CCTV cameras activated by proximity. LEVEL 4 explores communication between the human and animal kingdoms, and Ernst Haeckel’s notion that language is the discriminating factor between them. A voice-changing device—the mouther—transforms the gamer’s utterances into incomprehensible animal sounds, preventing him/her from normal human interaction. LEVEL 5 changes the player’s appearance with theriomorphic features dependent on random sets of alternative geographies. LEVEL 6 mixes the consummatory cycles of gamers and bees. Optoelectronic devices paired with recognition technology mask billboards and signs with images of flowers, thus neutralizing their imposed top-down message. LEVEL 7 augments objects with electronic hairs, quills, scales, tails and feathers based on readings of atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and temperature.

And this game is potentially infinite. As Ferracina writes, “Hundreds of potential levels follow, each representing both a pause in the self-absorbed routine of everyday survival and a window into the partial objectivities of human and animal ‘others.’ Rather than describing a progression culminating in the player’s victory and the software’s apparent defeat, the game folds continuously back upon itself, weaving new dynamic relations—new feedback loops—between living beings and their post-natural environments.”

[Image: LEVELS 5, 6, and 7 from “Theriomorphous Cyborg” by Simone Ferracina].

It’s a compelling, and highly provocative project; congratulations to Simone Ferracina for taking first prize.

[Images: Two glimpses of “Museums of the City” by David Gissen (renderings by Victor Hadjikyriacou), commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art for Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions; the title of this post comes from David Gissen].

[Image: Milled terrain from “The Active Layer/Next North” by Lateral Office & InfraNet Lab, part of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions at the Nevada Museum of Art].

[Images: Liam Young constructs a robot Galapagos for “Specimens of Unnatural History,” part of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions at the Nevada Museum of Art].