ROUND:Cambridge is a site-specific participatory sound art installation that explores the public art collection in Cambridge, MA through music and evolving participant commentary. The installation ‘inhabits’ the entire city of Cambridge by creating a location-sensitive layer of audio consisting of a musical composition along with commentary recorded in-situ by participants. Participants are able to tag any location in the city with their own recordings about the public art (or anything else!) and those recordings are immediately available for other participants to hear within the context of the piece when in the same location. Each participant experiences a continuous, unique, real-time audio stream as they walk, weaving location-specific voice content in with a location-aware instrumental composition.
ROUND:Cambridge is a new piece of public art, commissioned by the Cambridge Arts Council, that not only exists in the public domain like the sculptures, murals and other public art in Cambridge, but also is created from the raw material of thoughts, ideas and commentary collected from the public in an actively inclusive way. By allowing people to leave their mark or tag on the landscape in a non-destructive way, Cambridge is transformed into a collective audio work.
This project is currently in “soft-release” mode. It is fully functional and people can experience it and add to it, but it is still in the early stages, so things will be changing a bit more rapidly as I continue to experiment, do some fine-tuning and actively gather more voices. In the Spring of 2012, there will be an official launch along with a gallery show at the CAC gallery.
Many of the voices now populating the landscape were recorded by the Public Art Youth Council which is a program of the Cambridge Arts Council and the City of Cambridge Mayor’s Office. Led by Teresa Hunter, this fearless group of teens spent 6 weeks this past summer exploring the public art in Cambridge and talking about it with each other. Thanks to you all for the great material to get things going!
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Special Thanks
To Joe Zobkiw, Rob Knapen and Ben McAllister for their fantastic software development skills and their dedication to Roundware and ROUND:Cambridge. Thanks guys!
