(video of intervention @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rgUf4c4x14)
There's a large undeveloped area at the intersection of Water St. and Ogden. I’d seen it by bus and by car several times, but the immediate experience of the space is completely different. It seems much more vast, especially the sky, which
appears to extend upward in an enormous arc. The ground is gravel overgrown with wild plants, and the sound of the crickets is sonorous and entrancing. It's a space that once was something else, now barren and open.
I was drawn to the aural qualities of the area, so I decided to play my violin there. My grandfather made my instrument, and it's something I usually pull out on my own, enclosed in my apartment. My hope was that such a maneuver made public would call attention to the space's inherent beauty.
Sound is an experience that is inseparable from place in a somewhat different manner than the visual. It's comprised of waves rippling through the atmosphere that morph as they meet and merge with another force, like the reverberations of a passing car, or the wind. Just blocks away, along Water St., there is another site whose structure was made intentionally for acoustics, that I've chosen as my second location. This is the Pabst Mansion (image below), which was built in 1895 in the tradition of the great European opera houses, displaying ornate Baroque architecture. Though much more grandiose than my own little performance on an overgrown and polluted plot of land, it carries a similar purpose, and this is intriguing.
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