Dreamy Me is part of a series of exhibits called ‘Now. Here. This.‘, curated and hosted by 3-art, a wonderful triumvirate of artists/curators who do a whole bunch of amazing things.  Please check it out; you can listen and customize your audio stream right from the website and every time you listen, it will sound different, so check back frequently!

The title of the issue is “Audience Response” and there will a number of scholarly articles, another art project and my piece, called Music for Journaling.  It’s fairly obvious why they wanted my work for an issue on this topic!

Essentially, I will be writing a piece of music designed to be listened and contributed to by people who are reading or have read the journal itself.  I envision people all over the world reading the journal in the comfort of their own homes while hearing ongoing and evolving commentary from each other.  I hope the experience will be as if you are jumping into the collective stream of consciousness of all the journal readers as they explore the ideas, philosophies and opinions expressed about public art throughout the journal.

I know that I will be back, probably quite a lot.  Things are progressing for a potential future exhibit and if that happens, there will be many more trips.  Here’s a (not so) pretty picture of what I am thinking for the exhibit:

• blue buildings: Smithsonian art museums whose archives I will be using in the exhibit
• gray circles: different sections of the location-based musical composition
• orange dots: archival artist voice recordings
• red dots: present-day participant recordings

I included this diagram in a presentation I gave at the Archives of American Art today which attempted to wrap up what I have done with my time here.  It was a really useful exercise to take a step back and assess and try to put it all into a few Keynote slides. I feel like I have just begun something very exciting and potentially far-reaching and influential in my career…let’s hope I’m right!

In many ways, this might seem to be more promotion than anything else, but since my work always comes from the site-specific inputs and raw materials I collect or am presented with, I am excited to think about how such connections could influence the aesthetic content of the piece.  I really like the idea of my piece filling the ‘spaces between the museums’ with something that is both new and old, is always evolving and is directly related to the Smithsonian, its history and how that relates to the present day.  By connecting my piece, however obtusely, to something happening concurrently inside a museum that participants can visit and experience as well, I think that the piece would become not only an experience in and of itself, but also something that encourages other related experiences.

My work is all about integrating people and places into a collective experience and if I can make use of and connect to things that actually exist in the real world, this can be a very mutually beneficial situation.

I am extremely wary of anything I do turning into an overtly educational or ‘functional’ piece as my goals are obviously to create new artwork first and foremost.  I’ll need to be really careful as to how these connections to exhibits are communicated or else I won’t be helping my cause! I have a hard enough time already telling people time and time again “no, this isn’t an audio tour!!”, but typically as soon as someone starts to experience my work, they realize it is way too random to be intended as primarily educational which will hopefully enable them to get a bit lost and let the audio help them explore.

It’s never really about paying attention for me.  It’s much more about letting things wash over you and through you and letting your brain make all those unconscious choices that brains make to bring certain things to the forefront and let other things fade away.

I am still very much not looking forward to getting legal clearance to use all of the recordings I want to use, but it seems as though this is going to be unavoidable.  Thankfully, there are some SI museums that have gone to the trouble to put their audio and video assets up online, so their public availability makes things simpler, but other museums don’t even have their archives digitized, so that’s another challenge altogether.

This new approach of using voices recorded by other people for different purposes is very interesting as it opens up so many more possibilities for my work, but I wish I had an intern/assistant/lawyer to help!  Maybe some day?

OK, back to culling through the 306 audio recordings available in the Hirshhorn archives…

the glorious NJT

As soon as you get past Philly, and pass into Delaware, the end is near.

the glorious DMB

I knew I would hit some rush hour somewhere along the route, but I did not expect this:

beltway snow

Yes, those are snowflakes in my headlights! We’ve gotten basically no snow all season in Boston and I drive to DC in hopes of avoiding some of winter only to be met by so much snow that flights out of Dulles were cancelled. Granted it only takes an inch for this to happen down here…

I was able to listen to a bunch of RadioLab podcasts which were very interesting and did wonders for passing the monotony en route. I never am able to remember all the details, but the show they did on memory (ha ha) was fascinating. I knew that memories were malleable things and consequently not very reliable, but I was amazed to learn that apparently not only do they change over time, but the rate of change and/or degradation from the truth is directly proportional to the number of times that a particular memory is accessed. Kind of like analog tape where the more times you play your Pink Floyd cassettes, the more they wear down and sound worse.

This is totally counter-intuitive to me because you would think that the memories you access a lot have less of a chance to stagnate and be forgotten. But apparently this is incorrect because the current thinking is that each time a memory is accessed, it is actually re-created. In other words, the neurons re-form and re-make the memory, erasing the original and replacing it with the new version. So this erasing and replacing process provides an opportunity for change and there is no permanently “saved” version that we can refer back to. No online backup (yet). The most “pure”, or perhaps accurate, memories are the ones the least frequently recalled, so an amnesiac has the best memory.  Talk about counter-intuitive!