Is there poetry in the screech of a garbage truck? Beauty in the buzz of fluorescent lights? Music in a businessman’s cell-phone conversation?
Art in a Port-a-Potty?
Found Sound, a public art project in the streets of northwest Washington, seeks to answer these questions as it calls attention to the sounds of everyday life we often take for granted.
Organized by independent curator Welmoed Laanstra, the project comprises a series of listening booths – the majority of which are modified Port-a-Potties – located near, and occasionally inside, local art galleries. Each booth features a different sound-artist with work ranging from complete silence to complex digital “soundscapes.”
“The task was definitely daunting,” Laanstra says. “It took forever to get the permits and find donors.”
Unlike conventional exhibitions in which work is displayed within the same room or building, the work of Found Sound is spread out over more than a dozen city blocks, making the long hikes between booths through bustling downtown streets a part of the experience.
“I am a very firm believer in public art,” Laanstra says. “I think it is important to bring art to people. If I can get two out of 10 people to go into a booth, it is still more than would go to a gallery.”
Laanstra, who works from her home in Takoma Park, began developing the project last October as a way to “continue the momentum” of recent sound-orienting exhibitions, such as Visual Music at the Hirshhorn Museum, and explore the possibilities of sound as a medium.
Oftentimes, the installations have patrons focusing on sounds they would not notice ordinarily. At the Adamson Gallery on G Street, hidden speakers in the building’s stairwell amplify the subtle hum of a column of fluorescent light bulbs.
“I had a woman call me and say there wasn’t any sound there and I told her to go back and listen more closely,” Laanstra says. “She called me back, excited, saying ‘I got it! I got it!’ I thought that was really great; it’s the kind of thing we’re going for.”
Brandon Morse, an assistant professor of art at the university, is one of nine sound artists featured in Found Sound. At his installation on Connecticut Avenue, a small microphone attached to the Conner Contemporary Art building picks up the sound of traffic on the street and incorporates it with the mix playing in the booth.
Morse’s piece, “Ballast,” was created using a software program he wrote, which randomly combines samples of radio static, an old Wurlitzer piano and a host of electronic blips and warbles.
“It was a reactive process,” Morse says. “I started with a tone generated through the program and then sort of worked off of that.”
In the booth outside the Adamson Gallery, artist Alberto Gaitán manipulates the sounds of people’s voices over a flood of mechanical babble. Though it is difficult to discern actual words, listeners are left with a sense of the “flow” and impression of language.
Much like the other sound-artists featured in Found Sound, Gaitán is taking the sounds of everyday life and re-imagining them, proving if you listen hard enough, you will be amazed at what you can find.
Found Sound opened last Friday and runs through Nov. 5. A complete list of locations is available at www.welmoedlaanstra.com.
Contact reporter Sean Markey at diversions@dbk.umd.edu.
