GHOST ARROYOS

For the 2015  Market Street Prototyping Festival landscape architect Emily Schlickman and I were awarded a grant to sonically and visually highlight a former underground creek that emerged into a salt marsh just south of Market Street in downtown San Francisco. 

One part of the Ghost Arroyos project marks the waterway on the urban surface, while the other part envelopes the “ghost-scape” with sound. My collaborator, Emily Schlickman conceived, mapped, and designed the visual for the project, while I developed and installed the sound piece that invites people into an auditory sanctuary amidst the hectic ambient city sounds of Market Street.

The project was featured in Fast Company, The Atlantic’s City Blog, Curbed, and SFist and presented at SF's Urban Film Festival in 2015.

Infinite City (in the woods)

For the White Rabbit Open Air Art Festival, I collaborated with the residency's founder, Tom Young, on a site-specific, sculpture installation in the woods of Red Clay farm in Upper Economy, Nova Scotia.  Tom asked me to create a soundscape to accompany his sculpted vision of a burning city, an ode to urban landscapes and the people that occupy them, nestled in the remote Canadian wilderness. 

The motivation behind his vision was this: Lots of money is poured into planting trees within the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia in order to bring people in contact with nature. (A slightly absurd investment given the access to natural landscapes just at the edge of the city's borders). Tom wanted to bring "unnatural" cubed forms to the forest to play with this idea. It was a satirical jab to those festival goers who came to the woods in order to escape the city. 

His buildings, nestled in a beautiful mossy landscape, were lit on fire from the inside so they resembled a glowing city skyline. As the city began to burn, I broadcast my city soundcape over the the airwaves of the farm's pirate radio station and streamed the sound through speakers hidden among the trees. 

Over 150 people gathered to listen to the imagined, infinite city I had created from my own recordings I'd collected on visits to cities across the globe: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Malaga, Palo Alto, San Francisco, and my car radio as I drove up the California Coast. 

TAKEN WITH WATER

For the White Rabbit Open Air Art Festival in 2016, Veronica Simmonds and I created a site-specific sound walk at Red Clay farm in Upper Economy, Nova Scotia

Red Clay farm sits atop the Bay of Fundy, home to the highest and lowest tides in the world. We reflected on the power and protection of water in this 8 minute sonic experience that invites one listener at a time to plunge under the (sound) waves. 

Special thanks to William Sammons for lending his impeccable sound design skills for portions of this piece.