Session 3 Paper Stream 3: Stewardship of Place Through the Arts
Abby Aresty: "Sound, Community, Place: Reflections on Sound Art in Urban Parks as a Tool for Enhancing Community Appreciation of Shared, Natural Urban Spaces"
A deeply felt connection to place can motivate community efforts to protect local environments. But while purposeful listening is a powerful tool for building such connections, the machine noise that pervades urban parks’ soundscapes often discourages visitors from actively listening to their environment. In this paper, I therefore consider temporary, site-specific sound art as a promising addition to traditional noise management approaches, and particularly emphasize the purposeful listening such projects engender as a tool for engaging communities with local, shared natural spaces. As a case study, I outline the inspiration for, creation, and reception of Paths II: The Music of Trees, a sound art project installed in Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum in October 2012. I analyze the implementation and reception of this work to examine how sound art can build positive community listening experiences by inviting visitors to explore familiar spaces in unfamiliar ways.
Tomiko Jones: "Engaging the Landscape: Transitional Places"
In this media presentation I outline temporary art projects. In site-responsive installation, I build immersive environments using existing features of the landscape as the starting point and add elements of sculpture, photography, video, light, audio and performance. These investigations bring up questions of the role of stewardship. Uncovering the West Tributary (2010), commissioned by the City of Bellevue, Washington, drew attention to a devastated urban salmon stream. Progressive city planners proposed to “day light” the piped stream and restore the damaged wetland to create ecological stability and build public greenways. I worked with the city’s lead biologist and obtained video footage of the salmon runs to weave into the outdoor projections. The video and environmental installation Canal (2013), commissioned by Scottsdale Public Art, Arizona, was made in response to the Salt River Project with implications of the Arizona Canal, drinking water for the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, and speaks to the politics of water in the west.
Quietly significant moments are found in transitional places between land and water, destruction and reclamation, language and thought. In fall 2013 I received the En Foco New Works Fellowship to complete Rattlesnake Lake (exhibited 2014, ongoing), a long-term photographic project in the Cedar River Watershed, Washington State. Earlier images at Rattlesnake Lake were made exclusively with Type 55 4x5 Polaroid negatives. I collected water to clear the film, as an invitation of the lake to merge physically into the image. As materials have changed or become extinct, I adapted my process. The platinum/palladium appealed to me with the alchemy of precious metals, while the medium and scale of the prints were referential of photography’s historical role in geological surveys, western expansionism, and notions of territory and ownership.
Arthur Sabatini and Pete Wyer: "Time Structure Mapping: On Pete Wyer's Music, Sound, Places, Performances, and Reimaginings"
Over the past decade, composer Pete Wyer has devised a compositional process called Time Structured Mapping (TSM) that has resulted in a series of works that engage natural sound, acoustic environments, sound/music and technology, cross-cultural communication, participation and place. (pmwmusic.com). With an interlocutor, Pete Wyer will outline his TSM as aesthetic research projects and reflect on global sound environments, creative responses and sonic ecologies. Among the works he will discuss (and play samples from) are: Simultaneity Works that involve recordings at the same time in different locations. These include, NYC Circle, made in Columbus Circle, NYC that mapped a circumference that passed through buildings and around the periphery of Columbus Circle, all playing back across multiple speakers. Other projects were: Four Bridges, which simultaneously engaged musician in London, Frankfort, Boston and Mumbai; and World Time, where recordings worldwide were produced that indicated specific mention of time (bells, alarms, loud speakers, etc). A more current work is Rain at Night, which is a monologue that follows the journey of water in specific locations. Future projects are planned. Such performance events and aesthetic research – raise questions about sonic geographies, aural pattern, uses of technology, urban sound and social participation, and reimaginings and creative methods for approaching understanding the sonic ‘balance/unbalance’ in today’s world. This will be the focus of this conversation between the speakers and the audience.
