The new “trans-digital conservatory” Data Garden celebrated its launch yesterday with an ambitious public art extravaganza at Bartram’s Garden, the stately botanical garden founded in 1728 on the banks of the Schuykill river in southwest Philadelphia. Entitled “Switched-On Garden,” the event was a lovely mix of technology and nature, old and new, experimental art and unpretentious fun. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the live performances began, but I took time to check out each of the four sound installations.
Right on the banks of the Schuykill, near an outcropping over the river known as Notched Rock, New York-based artists Dan Scofield and Miriam Simun set up a small forest space in which several ambiently placed speakers emitted haunting, disconnected electronic tones. Responding to the information gathered by infrared sensors mounted on trees, the sounds reacted subtly to the presence of listeners.
A participatory work by Brazilian sound artist Vivian Cacurri was set up on a wooden platform called the octagon. Eight tree stumps, each with its own contact microphone, provided seating for visitors to step up and perform as they please. The microphones were run though a mixing unit whose amplification and delay effects served to blur the relationship between the sounds and their sources, creating a sonic anonymity that encouraged even the shy to take part.
In the lily pond near the middle of the grounds, Philadelphia musician Jesse Kudler created a floating sound installation consisting of small speakers connected to mp3 players mounted on four rectangles of styrofoam, which strangely resembled icebergs. The quiet, continuous tones melded gently into the ambient soundscape.
In the upper garden was an array of twittering and screeching electronic gadgets presented by Sam Cusumano of Electricity for Progress, an educational initiative that teaches people about electronics through circuit bending and other experimental endeavors. Nine stations placed about the garden presented various unassuming objects—from a Barbie karaoke machine to a trio of apples— that Cusumano had turned into glorious digital noisemakers. I tried out a number of the “instruments” myself but ultimately enjoyed just taking in the delightful phantasmagoria of uncoordinated sound.
The entire event called to mind an electrified version of R. Murray Schafer’s vision of the “soniferous garden,” a space devoted to communal music-making in a natural setting: ”In one corner of the garden…there might also be a place for a public instrumentarium, consisting of a number of simple instruments…so that the citizens of a community might come together and play together.”
October 17, 2011, 9:11pm
