O+A (Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland)

May 4-August 20, 2004
West and Vesey streets, Battery Park City
Photo © 2004 Charlie Samuels

Utilizing the Hudson River waterfront Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland created an installation that transformed the environment of the World Financial Center Plaza into an ambient soundscape. Three U-shaped tuning tubes, ranging from eight to eighteen feet in overall length, were wired with microphones and suspended over the North Cove of the harbor. Switches at different levels on the tubes were activated by the rising tides of the river, facilitating the collection of ambient noise such as docking commuter ferries, helicopter and jet traffic, car horns, waves, bird song, and breezes off the Hudson. Five custom-designed loudspeakers set around the plaza mixed the collected noises and radiated the sound in all directions. Blue Moon (a reference to the lunar phenomenon of two full moons in one month, an event which occured in July 2004) transported listeners, reminding them of the inherent temporal cycles of the broader biosphere in which we live, attuning them to the quotidian sounds on which we may not otherwise focus, and offered new perspectives on our environment.

In partnership with the World Financial Center Arts and Events Program and the Battery Park City Authority.

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Shirazeh Houshiary with Pip Horne

May 4, 2004-April 3, 2005
The Ritz-Carlton, 2 West Street
Photo © 2004 Charlie Samuels

Shirazeh Houshiary and Pip Horne’s Breath imbued the cool formality of minimalist sculpture with spirituality and human presence. The twenty foot tall tower of white enameled brick shaped like a double helix concealed a sound system that emitted four spiritual vocal tracks at a low sequence from dawn until dusk every day. The continuous eighteen minute loop of interwoven invocations included the Azan, the Islamic call to prayer; a Jewish tribute to God; tonal breathing exercises of Buddhist monks; and “O Jerusalem,” a historical Christian work by 12th-century composer Hildegard von Bingen. As the recording expanded and contracted in intensity it conveyed a sense of inhalation and exhalation to the inanimate sculpture. Breath’s structural spiral further underscored a sense of perpetual motion, defying the potential stasis of its medium.

For Houshiary and Horne the collective melodic range and diverse languages in the songs of prayer gestured towards basic similarities in humanity. Breath used both the form of the physical code for life (DNA) and rhythmic, meditative sounds to unite diverse religious traditions and make a particulary relevant statement in a time of misguided religious zeal and fractured globalism.

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