bb: posterous

... then it too has come to a place where the road falls off, a place where there is no public space and the landscape is being paved over, where leisure is shrinking and being crushed under the anxiety to produce, where bodies are not in the world but only indoors in cars and buildings, and an apotheosis of speed makes those bodies seem anachronistic or feeble. In this context, walking is a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences.

Tomorrow evening (Thursday) at 6:30 pm, I'll be speaking on a panel organized by the wonderful slowLab, entitled "Slowing Down: Artists and Designers Mapping the City" at New York's Museum of Art and Design, at 2 Columbus Circle. On the panel with me will be Christian Nold and Natalie Jeremijenko, and the evening will be moderated by artist Sabrina Gschwandtner.
Christian will present his mapping projects, which reveal aspects of the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. I'll discuss my work, particularly my Park Bench Cinema series of site-specific audio work -- Almost Grand and Eleven Dreams in Red Hook. Natalie will discuss her health activism clinic that dispenses prescriptions for local data collection, urban interventions, and participatory art/design projects to improve an individual's wellbeing in the city.
 
More information is available here. Please come by if you're interested!

"Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the ail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic."

- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

I'll have a walkthrough up shortly... but in the meantime:

From Wired. Listen to the reverb!

I think this is the official video from Creative Time.

It's fascinating to see people's reactions so close up.

A longer feature, from Boing Boing.

My first impressions: the space feels mythic, perched on the water, haunted by anthropomorphic sounds. I found it just as interesting to simply listen to it creak and sway as to play the organ.

I took the free IKEA water taxi to get there from Red Hook, which was super fun.