Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment María Andueza Department Historia del Arte III (Contemporáneo), Facultad de Bellas Artes, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Spain anduezam@hotmail.com In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 Abstract This paper examines urban site-specific sound installations, as an artistic expression that integrates other disciplines such as sociology and urbanism in the practice and theory of art. It also explores the impact these soundworks produce not only on the physical city but also on the role that citizens play in it. I propose a critical and theoretical approach to this field of sonic arts from the main topics that along time artists have been concerned for in their artwork: on the one hand the relationship between the artwork and the spectator, and on the other the analysis and reasoning of the space through the work of art. In considering site-specific sound installation from these two starting points, the echoes of the previous non-sonorous artistic tradition, especially that closest to its advent in the mid-sixties are noticeable. For this reason, together to their sonorous specificity, other arguments, such as their sociological, urban and phenomenological implications, are rather suggested in this discussion to come up to the expanded and renewed concept of total art integrated within the dynamics of the city. In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 87 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment Introduction Art history, created and shaped by artists and theoreticians, often tends to classify artworks according to disciplines based on some of its obvious features. This fact, instead of enriching the artwork usually impoverishes it by attaching to the piece labels such as ‘video art’, ‘land art’ or – why not – ‘sound art’. Artworks are isolated within styles, or techniques and materials employed by the artists. However, these categories are often unrepresentative of the works that meet the criteria and reduce to essences the artworks, reducing also their expressive richness and their suggestive qualities just to mere distinctions. Instead of speaking about a particular work, the terms refer to a whole group of works often diverse. When different disciplines and genres get mixed, new subcategories appear, limiting the already limited; limiting, even, their role in contemporary creation. A new discipline sometimes seems to be a very innovative artistic manifestation, but in depth it only presents minor variations on what we already knew. Sound sculpture, sound poetry, sound installations or soundscape are some of the subcategories that derive from sound art, which in turn is a subcategory of the fusion of art and music. Nevertheless, there are many artists and theorists who have rejected or expressed caution towards these terms. The American artist Max Neuhaus, whose artwork is strongly related to sound material, has spoken against the term ‘sound art’. Paraphrasing the famous statement by Marshal McLuhan, Neuhaus said: ‘In art, the medium is often not the message.’ (Neuhaus 2000) The artist wanted to reject the noise factor of the artworks as a reason to collect them under a single denominator. Also, theoreticians such as Alan Licht have pointed out the complexity of the term and the doubts it generated to artists such as Annea Lockwood and Christian Marclay (Licht 2007). There are also specialists from other disciplines, such as the social anthropologist Tim Ingold, reconsidering this terminology. In one of his articles, included in the book Autumn Leaves, recently published by the CRiSAP at London (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice) he has rejected the term soundscape, which he finds obsolete (Ingold 2007). According to the author, the term was useful at the beginning because it was suggestive in its rhetorical purpose by drawing attention to the ‘aural sensory register’ that had been omitted from art in the precedent tradition. However, Ingold found that the term limits the sound to relations between objects instead of thinking about sound in itself. He compares it with the phenomenon of light in visual culture, which usually attends to the composition and the object’s relationship and not to light itself as the phenomenon that makes it all possible. So, where is the phenomenon of sound in sound art? Sound, the author explains, is a phenomenon that blends the physical and the mental; sound is above all immersion, a phenomenon of experience. This idea has also been considered by some of the main authors in sound and art1. Not only Neuhaus or Ingold have explored it. In his main theoretical research about sound, Traité des Objets Musicaux, the composer Pierre Schaeffer has pointed at sound itself as an aural object separated from its source. Sound has its own identity, but, as Schaeffer explains, sound is also a personal experience. Regarding sound art, the physical presence of the visitors is relevant, specifically in those situations in which the artists work with sound in a specific place. This is more evident if the idea of site-specific is applied to the city. In that case we should refer to citizens and not viewers or visitors of the artwork. In the city, the artists must consider a complex network of social, political and ethical circumstances. Sounds introduced by artists in the context of the city will establish a dialogue with all of the dynamics of a particular space. This In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 88 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment means considering the citizenship and the architectural or urban façade of the city taking into account the political, social and ethical procedures that manage it. In connection with this aspect, many artists and authors mention the capabilities of sound to create a closer relationship between the urban space and subjects, which eventually could somehow lead to their immersion in the city itself. However, with a few rare exceptions, in the majority of the cases it remains just as a tangential idea, not developed in depth, neither by the artists nor by theorists in their texts. To consider citizens immersed in the space of a sound installation means taking into account not only the aural phenomena but also the ones that coexist with the space and time of the citizens. In fact, this broader topic was very popular in the urban culture at the end of the fifties and throughout the sixties. Specialists from different disciplines approached the city with an extended idea of their own field’s limitations. Sociologists, urban planners and also artists defended the notion of a city as a result of simultaneity of different activities. It was in this period when sitespecific sound installations first appeared in the city. In 1967, the musician and artist Max Neuhaus created his first ‘sound work’ in the city. Since the advent of sound installation in this cross-disciplinary atmosphere in the late sixties, its study must be placed within this context and not as an autonomous practice disconnected from it. Thus, taking up again Ingold’s topic, in these works sound ought to be interpreted as a phenomenon, but not uniquely; sound should also be considered as a result of the subject’s perception in space: the citizens’ subjectivities together with their spacetime experiences, ought to be considered as a process that blends their own presence in the City as part of the artistic process that they unleash. The origins of site-specific in sound and installation Drive-in Music was the title of this first installation by Neuhaus in Buffalo, New York. He set up seven radio transmitters along half a mile of a road. Each radio transmitter had an antenna attached that shaped the sound, since it determined the range of sound emission. All of the sounds, a mixture of sine waves, were broadcasted on the same dial on the radio. The work was completely invisible since all of the devices were hidden in the trees situated along both sides of the road. Neuhaus planned to intervene the street without making it obligatory to be perceived. That was the main reason why he decided to work with radios in cars. People who chose to put on their radios heard, depending on how they got through the street with their cars, a different set of sounds. Movement, velocity, but also external conditions such as the weather, would determine how the work sounded. With Drive-in Music Neuhaus opened the group of works called Passage that he defined as follows: ‘The Passage works are situated in spaces where the physical movement of the listener through the space to reach a destination is inherent. They imply an active role on the part of listeners, who set a static sound structure into motion for themselves by passing through it. My first work with an aural topography, Drive In Music in 1967, falls within this vector.’ (Neuhaus 1998) But also, Drive-in music kept in contact with the conceptual art tradition that was arriving to its climax in that period. Since ‘drive-in’ means, ‘any installation designed to accommodate patrons in their automobiles’ it was a very significant action if we consider it from the perspective of Neuhaus’ retirement of the concert hall. He moved to public spaces to avoid the distance between music and listeners; with Drive-in Music not only musical experts, but also those that were not initiated in music were able to create their own composition. This In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 89 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment was the first work of art ever made in the city with these characteristics and Neuhaus coined the term ‘sound installation’ for it. It was in between Marcel Duchamp’s montages and the happenings that Allan Kaprow and John Cage had done some years before. In 1952, at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, John Cage had carried out Theater Piece No.1 in collaboration with different professors and students of the college. In addition to Cage himself, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and David Tudor performed a set of micro actions in an innovative distribution of the space: spectators were situated in the centre and all the actions were performed around or in between them, so people had to decide where to look at, and as a consequence, not everybody experimented the same event. Time, duration and simultaneity became relevant in the space where actions and subjects coexisted. This break away from the performance stage in Cage and later in Neuhaus’ sound installations was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud. The next fragment, taken from his Second Manifesto of The theatre of Cruelty (1938), could be interpreted as the script of Cage’s performance at The Black Mountain College: ‘(…) the Theatre of Cruelty intends to reassert all the time-tested magical means of capturing the sensibility. These means, which consist of intensities of colours, lights, or sounds, which utilize vibration, tremors, repetition, whether of a musical rhythm or a spoken phrase, special tones or a general diffusion of light, can obtain their full effect only by the use of ‘dissonances’. But instead of limiting these dissonances to the orbit of a single sense, we shall cause them to overlap from one sense to the other, from a colour to a noise, a word to a light, a fluttering gesture to a flat tonality of sound, etc. So composed and so constructed, the spectacle will be extended, by elimination of the stage, to the entire hall of the theatre and will scale the walls from the ground up on light catwalks, will physically envelop the spectator and immerse him in a constant bath of lights, images, movements, and noises. The set will consist of the characters themselves, enlarged to the stature of gigantic manikins, and of landscapes of moving lights playing on objects and masks in perpetual interchange. And just as there will be no unoccupied point in space, there will be neither nor vacancy in the spectator’s mind or sensibility. That is, between life and the theatre there will be no distinct division, but instead a continuity. Anyone who has watched a scene of any movie being filmed will understand exactly what we mean.’ (Artaud 1981, pp.125-126) Under the influence of Artaud, the artistic practice of Cage and later Neuhaus meant a turning point from the precedent artistic tradition. The action in Black Mountain College was not specifically framed in any style or artistic discipline; Cage blended all the actions in the space and time of its own happening, and he did it by ‘considering the objects in the environment, including the various arts, such as sounds’ (Barber 1985, p. 30). He probably used the word ‘sounds’ to refer to the duration and temporality of the complete set of actions, whose organisation revealed the chance relationship he wanted to establish with the audience. In 1955 he argued: ‘we are concerned with the coexistence of dissimilars, and the central points where fusion occurs are many: the ears of the listeners wherever they are.’ (Cage 1973, p. 12) Some years later, and coming from Europe, the artist Wolf Vostell developed in depth this idea in his work. Different actions connecting art and life carried out stinging denunciations of social and political circumstances of the city. In most of them, sound was an essential factor that he usually used to capture the attention of the individuals-citizens over the physical aspect of the spaces, but also to connect the space with the emotional impact it creates in people. In the manifesto he read at the beginning In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 90 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment of In Ulm, around Ulm and round about Ulm (1964) the artist demonstrated his interest was not located in the actions but in the interactions of people with them. ‘Art as space, space as an outline, an outline as a happening, a happening as art, art as life Life as a work of art Not escaping from reality but toward reality. Art as an event, as a Happening, to experiment with the own body to become oneself: colour, light, time, materials, noises; one becomes art and let it come not to improve the world but to develop a new relationship with it declare art as what I consider art (...)’ (Agúndez 1999, p. 193) Two years before this happening, in 1962, Vostell organised urban routes in Paris as a form of art. These routes were very similar to those carried out by Dada group and the Surrealist in the 1920s in Paris. Vostell’s purpose for these routes in 1962 was to compel people to perceive. In short, he tried to get citizens to become aware of their own everyday environment from a perceptive perspective: to observe the ruins and the posters ripped or to hear sounds and noises of the city. The artist explained: ‘If I think about this happening that my Fluxus music comes from everything that produces life, and not only from instruments, then I have to take people out to listen the noises, hear the screams and voices, to see the rubble, the ruins, not to take the bus just for doing shopping but making them aware of their city.’ (ibid, p. 121) This happening, as it occurred with the majority of Vostell’s, also had an educational purpose: to try to get people to become aware of all the information they could gather from their perception of the city. In 1974, almost a decade later, the artist Allan Kaprow wrote in the third part of The education of the Unartist about the art that had emerged in that period, in which artists found references in society itself rather than taking inherited guidelines from precedent arts. He mentioned this happening by Vostell, Ligne P.C. Petite Ceinture, as a ‘learning model’ (Kaprow 2003, p. 130) and also included the guided tour of a power plant planned in New York in 1966 by Neuhaus. He was a famous percussionist and he was also performing his own compositions at that moment. He knew well the work that Cage and Varese had made with sounds coming from the environment and instead of continuing with this course he decided to replace the concert hall with the city so people could recognise these sounds in their own context. ‘Why limit listening to the concert hall? Instead of bringing these sounds into the hall, why not simply take the audience outside – a demonstration in situ?’ (Neuhaus 1988) The reception of everyday sounds by the citizens was the main idea of these guided tours or soundwalks that he coined LISTEN. That meant considering the sounds connected with everyday activities and their social implications. He forced a perceptual awareness of the urban environment, not only aural perception but full body perception. In the power plant Neuhaus wanted people to feel the vibrations of sound in their own bodies. These type of actions enabled people to transcend the typical cultural construction of a city and substitute it by another one, more personal and closely connected to their own experiences. These experiences immersed people in their own context, there was no specific work of art; there was just the intention of finding new sensitive sources to listen to sound and hear it in the complex environment of a city. This idea is connected to one of the main concerns other specialists from different perspectives were working with: the individual in the city as the holder of an active role that configures it. In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 91 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment The city in the spotlight That is the case of the American urbanplanner Kevin Lynch, whose contributions in urbanism were controversial due to the importance he gave in his theoretical urban studies to the impressions of citizens as a valuable channel of information for later planning. As in the case of Neuhaus and Vostell, Lynch also found the city as a place for learning, a reason for inverting the concerns of urban planners and thinking about urbanism from the experience of the citizens: ‘The city can be enormously informative, since the pattern of remains is a vast if jumbled historical index. Signs, tours, guides, and other communications devices can bring out the latent history of a complex site, with little of the interference with present function that may be caused by the massive physical reconstruction.’ (Lynch 2001, p. 54) In his first theoretical study of the city, The image of the City, which was published as a result of a field study in three different American cities in 1959, he paid attention to the attitude of citizens in the public space, which implied analysing their movements and behaviours in the space. He did not only study the citizens’ responses to the urban space, but also all the elements and conditions in the cityscape that trigger these responses. He called these visual patterns ‘legibility’ and connected it to the ‘mental image’. In other words, he connected the architectonical patterns of the city to the mental image of the city that any citizen constructs depending on his experience. The individual in Lynch’s study had a main role, and their perceptions and experiences in the city were considered as part of the urban planning. His approach to urban planning was briefly linked to Sociology and even to art. ‘Looking at the cities can give a special pleasure, however commonplace the sight may be. Like a piece of architecture, the city is a construction in space, but one of vast scale, a thing perceived only in the course of long spans of time. City design is therefore a temporal art, but it can rarely use the controlled and limited sequences of other temporal arts like music. On different occasions and for different people, the sequences are reversed, interrupted, abandoned, cut across. It is seen in all lights and all weathers. At every instant, there is more than eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.’ (Lynch 1960, p. 1) The idea of the city as a set of different actions to be perceived was very similar to the sociologist Henri Lefebvre´s thoughts as well as to the ideology and activity developed by the members of the Situationist International. Lynch never made explicit references to the activity of the Situationist International or to Henri Lefebvre´s sociological studies. We do not have any evidence that they knew each other personally. However, like them, Lynch agreed to point out the simultaneity of actions in the city, and therefore the confluence of different experiences of its citizens. Before Lynch, the Situationist International made a critique of urbanism where the properties and possibilities that a city could offer and does not were envisaged. They decided to give up the traditional artistic practice to develop a new urban theory, where they took advantage of the artistic discourses of perception and receptivity to suggest the psycogeography, a study of the city from the effects of its configuration over the emotions and affective behaviour of the citizens. As Guy Debord explained in his text ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ in 1955: ‘The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance (…) all this seems to be neglected. (…) the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, (…) gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 92 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment as any other form of spectacle can evoke.’ (Andreotti and Costa 1996, p. 20) They carried out derive as a form of recognizing urban space and its social sphere. The merger of random and decision-making provoked the signs of new sensations for the citizens in the space-time of their cities. The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre, with whom the Situationist International worked with for several years, pointed out that in the first derives the members of the Situationist International used walkytalkies to communicate and thus linked distant locations in the city through the oral transmission of the perception of the place. This is a very interesting aspect of the derives though it had not been given much importance and would mean a crucial experiment with sound in the city. Around a decade later, the American artist Maryanne Amacher in 1967 created a more sophisticated version of this type of urban connections. City Links: Buffalo was a 28-hour sound piece where five microphones were placed in different parts of the city. All the information recorded live was broadcasted by radio, connecting through sound and listening what we consider would be very different areas of the city. ‘Contemporary artists (also in a time of political turmoil) are similarly interested in making the present vivid. They are fascinated with improvisation, audience participation, performer-organized music, happenings, responsive or self-destroying sculpture, computerized light environments.’ (Lynch 2001, pp. 86-87) According to Lynch, as citizens are constantly moving and changing, it would be appropriate to incorporate sound and the sonorous in the city to share and connect in the cityscape the spatial experiences of the citizens. He made references to sound itself but he also put into practice some qualities of the musical discourse to explain a kind of experience in the space of the city. He resorted to terms such as time intervals, duration or movement to refer to a way of organising the space of the city according to the ‘kinaesthetic’ quality of some spaces regarding the sense of motion along them. He called it, in analogy to music, ‘melodic’ structure (Lynch 1960, p. 99). Lynch found that this melodic organisation would be the great challenge for the city of the future, in which movement, speed and multiplicity were gaining importance. This ‘melodic’ organisation of the cityscape would help to keep the movement of citizens in step with its visual façade, enriching the urban experience. Some of the artworks carried out by Neuhaus could exemplify this idea of a melodic organisation of the city developed with sound. In 1999, on a bridge in Bern, he installed Suspended Sound Line, where he somehow joked with the movement and the perception of the citizens that crossed the bridge. He distributed the sound in abutting regions that seemed to get softer as one approached them. However, Neuhaus coordinated the bridge’s structure with the sound structure as well as with the movement made by citizens while passing through the bridge. Another example of this melodic structure applied to the city through sounds are the City concerts of the Spanish artist Llorenç Barber. He has been performing these concerts since 1988 using bells found in buildings in different cities. He turns the city into a concert hall with the only difference being that there is no spatial barrier between sound, performers and the audience. Sounds coming from different bell towers create new paths and links in the architecture and urban planning of the city. Some of these sound interventions in the public space manage to establish a close and very natural dialogue with individuals and the city. It is partly thanks to the temporal factor that all three – sounds, individuals and cities – share, and partly thanks to the abolition of the idea of music, art or aesthetic perception constrained to specialists. In 1974, Henri Lefebvre, published his book The In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 93 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment Production of Space, in which he pointed out the importance of both ideas in the contemporary city. He found that in the modern city there was a lack of temporal references. ‘Let everyone look at the space around them. What do they see? Do they see time? They live time, after all; they are in time. Yet all anyone sees is movements. In nature, time is apprehended within space – in very heart of space: the hour of the day, the season, the elevation of the sun above the horizon (…) With the advent o of modernity time has vanished from social space. (…) Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as a threatening and dangerous (to power).’ (Lefebvre 2000, p. 95) As a result, people could hardly experience time in their daily lives except at work. In Lefebvre’s attempt to incorporate a social dimension in the creation of space, he defended time as being essential for the lived experience. It was not possible to assume the idea of a city without involving temporal actions in it. Lefebvre plunged the study of urban space into an even greater complexity by incorporating the temporal factor into the city. He also mentioned the mental projection of citizens over the perceptive experience; a topic that had called the attention of Lynch and the Situationist International and that would be a crucial factor when working with sound in public space. ‘The ‘theoretical’ error is to be content to see a space without conceiving of it, without concentrating discrete perceptions by means of a mental act, without assembling details into a whole ‘reality’, without apprehending contents in terms of their interrelationships within the containing forms.’ (ibid, p. 94) Since sound installations work with ephemeral material, they will emphasise this fact and somehow trap citizens in their temporality. This could make citizens become more aware of time passing in their cities according to their own time passing. Perception in the city through the Sound Installations The American artist Bill Fontana connected these two ideas in Panoramic Echoes that he installed in the spring of 2007 at the Madison Square Park in New York. One of the buildings on that square, the Met Life Tower, with four bells, had counted the passing of time in New York for almost 80 years. A few years ago the bells of this tower could no longer be heard. Fontana reactivated its sounds and recreated the echoes in the facades of the buildings around the square by moving real-time the sound recorded by the microphones to the speakers distributed on the roofs of the other buildings. This sound and its echoes were mixed with the recordings of birds and all of them were emitted from the top of the buildings. These sounds, by moving from one side to the opposite, imitating the flight of the birds over the square, gave the sensation of springtime in the city. By introducing these sounds into the public space, he surprised people. They looked for the actions producing the sounds and by doing so, he changed the direction of their usual horizontal sight to be vertical, opening a new dimension of space in the city. This is very similar to what took place in the artworks by Carl Andre when he decided to install them in the floor and by doing this he altered the horizontal projection of sight of the spectators and individuals in art and life. In 1970 in his ‘Artist’s Statement’ he explained: ‘My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road. That is, a road doesn't reveal itself at any particular point or form any particular point. Roads appear and disappear. We either have to travel on them or beside them. But we don't have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it. Most of my works (...) have been ones that are in a way causeways – they cause you to make your way along them or around them or move to the spectator over them. They're like roads, but certainly not fixed point vistas. I think sculpture should have and infinite point of view. In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 94 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment There should be no one place, nor even a group of places where you should be.’ (Kastner and Wallis 1998, p. 218) As with the works of Carl Andre, most of the installations carried out in cities require the relationship with the subject, or, to be more precise, with the citizens in the space. As the artworks are usually abstract presences in the space, they need people’s imagination to be completed and interpreted. All those perceiving the work must appropriate it in order to provide it with a meaning. Unlike the traditional art media, these works located on the street, in the domain of the public, seem to lose its authorships and need to be reappropriated by any of the perceivers that recognise their characteristics. The Dutch artist, Constant Nieuwenhuys2, belonging to the Situationist International, paid attention to the technological devices and their use in the city. He did it in The great game to come (1959) where he articulated the power they had to build a new relationship with the city and which had not yet been used: ‘The technical inventions that humanity has at its disposal today will play a major role in the construction of the ambiancecities of the future. It is worth noting that significantly, to date, these inventions have in no way contributed to existing cultural activities and that creative artists have not known what to do with them’. (Andreotti and Costa 1996, p. 62) As he explained, technology would be used for recreational ends, meaning ‘recreational’ as active participation, and constructive behaviour, of people that encounters it. This would be for Constant the solution not to restrict the city to only its functionality but let the city work as a stage for infinite real and utopian uses. He could not be more accurate, if we analyse it from the current scene. However, it is not yet possible to talk about the techniques employed for this purpose. Perhaps site-specific sound installations represent one of the few current attempts in which a connection between urban construction and city life has been proposed in a more participatory way, being both thoughtful and educational. Since it is impossible to control any of the situations coexisting with these works in the city, artists leave them to coexist with all the particularities (weather conditions, actions, people…) and somehow have been integrated in them. Listening is the necessary step that will match Recreational ends in Constant assertion with these artworks. Different studies pointed out listening from different perspectives but most of them emphasise the imaginary dimension of the listener as a great contribution in the listened. Pauline Oliveros, Yi-Fu Tuan, Barry Blesser, Hildegard Westerkamp, Jean-Francois Augouyard or Murray Schaeffer among others referred specifically to listening in the city and its shift from the previous situation. The latter affirm: ‘The lost of distant hearing is one of the most significant changes in aural perception in history. The urban environment has compressed acoustic space and confused directionality, making it often difficult or impossible to locate sources.’ (Augoyard 2005, p. XV) They will probably find some of the sound installations in the city as a channel for spatial recognition of people through the listening. Some works are focused on the restoration of the public space, sometimes its sonic ambiance and sometimes its sociological ambiance. In the case of the work Harmonic Bridge created by Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger under a common bridge in the city of Massachusetts in 1998, they intervened in the upper side of the bridge to alter the sonority of the lower. They added two C tuning tubes to the guardrails on either side of the overpass where they incorporated two microphones in two different harmonic intervals that created two different timbres. The sounds of the traffic recorded by the microphones were amplified in two concrete cubes designed by the artists and positioned In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 95 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment under the bridge. They changed a very complex aural ambiance placing the space in the key of C, so people heard it more comfortable and less faint and unpleasant. Through an interaction with the context of the city, sound installations develop an idea of democratisation of the space, where citizens have the opportunity to become aware of their context and to create a very personal relationship with the space and all the activities in it. Raising hearing to a more perceptible state will create an immersion of citizens in their own contexts and thus will give them the opportunity for a closer and aware relationship with their everyday and common space. This could mean to have a more active role in the city, but it would also mean living and enjoying the city, not merely crossing it. The anthropologist explained: Manuel Delgado ‘For E.T. Hall people that interact and try to be mutually predictable, “move together in a kind of dance, but they are not aware of their synchronous movements and they do so without music or conscious orchestration” (Hall 1978, p. 68). It is not so much that the sound can be ‘seen’ as the vision may receive a subtle organization pattern aurally.’ (Delgado 2005, p. 90) In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 96 María Andueza: Site-Specific Sound Installations in the Urban Environment Bibliography AGÚNDEZ, J. A. (1999) 10 Happenings de Wolf Vostell. Cáceres: Museo Vostell Malpartida. ANDREOTTI, L. and COSTA, X. (Eds.) (1996) Teoría de la deriva y otros textos situacionistas sobre la ciudad, Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, ACTAR. ARTAUD, A. (1958) The theatre and its double. New York: Grove Press. AUGOYARD, J.F. and TORGUE, H. (Eds.) (2005) Sonic Experience. Canada: McGill Queens University Press. BARBER, LL. (1985) John Cage, Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes. CAGE, J. (1973) Silence, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. DELGADO, M. (2005) El soplo en el jardín y el rugido en el bosque. QuAderns-e. 05/2005a [WWW] available from: http://www.antropologia.cat/quaderns-e-6. [accessed 24/04/2009] INGOLD, T. (2007) Against Soundscape. In: CARLYLE, A., eds. Autumn Leaves, Paris: Vibro / Double Entendre, pp. 10-13. KAPROW, A. (2003) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, California: University of California Press. KASTNER, J. and WALLIS, B. (Eds.) (1998) Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon. LEFEBVRE, H. (2000) The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell. LICHT, A. (2007) Sound Art. Beyond Music, between categories, New York: Rizzoli. LYNCH, K. (2001) What time is this Place?, Massachusetts: MIT Press. LYNCH, K. (2006) La imagen de la ciudad, Barcelona: GG Reprints. NEUHAUS, M. (1988) Listen [WWW] available from: http://www.maxneuhaus.info/soundworks/vectors/walks/LISTEN/ [accessed: 24/04/2009] NEUHAUS, M. (1998) Passage [WWW] available from: neuhaus.info/soundworks/vectors/passage/ [accessed 24/04/2009] http://www.max- NEUHAUS, M. (2000) Sound Art? First published as an introduction to the exhibition "Volume: Bed of Sound", P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, July 2000. [WWW] available from: http://www.max-neuhaus.info/bibliography/index_bib.htm [accessed 24/04/2009] NEUHAUS, M. (1994) Sound Works, Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag. 1 2 An example from the artistic field is the artwork by Joseph Beuys Plight in which he reverted the interior of a piano and covered the walls of the showroom with the same filter the piano have in its hammers. Constant was one of the founder members of the Situationist International in 1957. He contributed to the situationist ‘s Unitary Urbanism with the project for an utopic city New Babylon. In: Motje Wolf (Ed.) Proceedings of Sound, Sight, Space and Play 2009 Postgraduate Symposium for the Creative Sonic Arts De Montfort University Leicester, United Kingdom, 6-8 May 2009 http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009 97