Interactive Work

The interactive quality of Bill Fontana’s piece was shared by two other artists’ works in the show, Julianne Swartz’s Transfer (objects), and Jess Rowland’s The Other Side of Air: Notations for Interactive Sound (2017) and Life This In Find We (2017). Their interactivity immediately engaged the visitor with the work and encouraged an experience of wonder and discovery. This happened as well with Fontana’s MicroSoundings, but only for those audiences who knew to engage with the piece.

Transfer (objects) consisted of three rectangular objects sitting among volumes of poetry on a bookshelf in Sherman Art Library (figs. 15 and 16). Visitors would pick up each smooth, wooden object and hold its small, central hole to their ear. The act of picking up would activate the work, and after a pause lasting a few seconds, one would begin to hear the sound of writing, as well as a measured female voice (the artist’s) reading a passage aloud. Each of the three objects was uniquely shaped, and each played a separate recorded text.¹¹ The texts focused on the receptivity of listening—in essence, discussing precisely what the work was demanding of the listener. Visual, tactile, and auditory, Transfer (objects) engaged the senses in a comprehensive way.

This was a rather quiet and contained work that was made specifically for—indeed, in response to—the library environment (fig. 17). It asked the audience to think about how one receives information in written and audible terms. By encountering the work in a library, the audience may have been predisposed to engage in a certain kind of way. Lifting an object off a shelf is much different than catching a sound as you hurry along your way to work or class; it takes a certain kind of intention to engage. Laura Graveline, the art librarian, remarked that she saw both individuals and groups enjoy them and that “the subtlety of the objects was actually quite engaging for most people.”¹²

Like the Fairchild Atrium where Kirkegaard’s Transmission was sited, the art library is a heavily used study space for students. However, because Transfer (objects) is a singular, intimate listening experience (only one person can hear each object at a time), and because it is intermittent (active only when picked up), the library staff did not see the work as a disruption. In contrast to the Fairchild Atrium Committee, members of the library staff were much more open to hosting this work from Resonant Spaces (it is the art library after all), and in fact the library staff assumed the responsibility of periodically recharging the objects as needed.

As with Transfer (objects), interactivity was a key component of the five works by Jess Rowland on display at Hood Downtown. This gallery space hosted the introduction to the exhibition, and featured multiple works by Rowland and by Terry Adkins. It was the only location with multiple artists’ work. The group of objects Rowland created was installed on two surfaces of the wall directly in front of the main entrance to the gallery (fig. 18). These works were selected for their strong visual impact, accessibility, and creativity. The use and manipulation of found material, auditory and physical, helped to unite Rowland’s pieces with those of Adkins, and was a conscious choice on Rowland’s part.

Upon entering Hood Downtown, the visitor first encountered four rectangular works displayed on a wall facing the gallery entrance. These four pieces from The Other Side of Air: Notations for Interactive Sound initially look like musical scores, with lines arranged on a stripped-down staff. However, the lines are abstracted and rendered in shiny metallic tones: silver, copper, and red. Visually compelling, these works are immediately appreciable for the beauty and liveliness of their form. The two works that were installed on the right side of the wall emit their own sounds, audible if one stands rather close to them. Both the visual score for these works and the sound itself, derived from two pieces of classical music, have been abstracted. Rowland relays the sound through the paper, as if collapsing the distinction between notation and instrument will illuminate it all the more. The two works that were installed on the left require a more focused participation. The visitor must hold the disc from a stethoscope (disconnected from its tubing and ear pieces) over metallic lines traced across sheets of white paper, hovering the scope just above the paper’s surface, to activate a piece of music. To hear the music, once must place one’s ear near the stethoscope disc, quite close to the score—a proximity prohibited when viewing traditional works of art in a museum setting. The visitor must resist the temptation to run the stethoscope directly over the score, as that would stress the magnets and impose one’s own tempo on the piece.

Around the corner, hung vertically on the narrow side of the freestanding wall, was Life This In Find We (fig. 19). Created from an early twentieth-century piano roll, this piece privileges the integrity of that object, with the only visible alterations the shiny aluminum foil that fills the holes that originally allowed the song to play, and the addition of a narrow copper strip running down the side of the work (fig. 20). Life This In Find We is a beautiful visual object, but comes alive when the visitor places one hand on the copper strip, and another on one of the aluminum lines. By completing the circuit, this gesture activates as speaker to produce recorded sound. Depending on where one places one’s hand, three channels of sound can be layered, allowing the visitor to play the piano roll—no player piano needed. Visitors could also link hands, completing the electrical circuit as a group, to play the piece. Life This In Find We was one of the most popular works in the exhibition. This was due to the sense of surprise, discovery, and wonder aroused through its interactivity, and to the tonal quality of the sound produced (Rowland’s work plays a contemporary piece of music, not the song denoted by the title, lyrics, and matrix of dots on the roll).

With Swartz’s Transfer (objects) the visitor had some inkling of how and where sound would emanate from the objects when lifted to the listener’s ear. With Rowland’s The Other Side of Air and Life This In Find We, by contrast, there was a quality of the unknown. While the audience at Hood Downtown was primed to have an aesthetic experience simply by walking into the museum’s gallery space, the playful mechanisms Rowland employed were a delightful surprise. The opportunity for physical interaction with the objects, which violates common museum etiquette, likely added to their appeal. Often visitors received instruction from a group leader, or from one of the Hood’s visitor services staff, on how to operate Rowland’s works, making them much more accessible than the Resonant Spaces installations in more public, but unstaffed, spaces.