Roulette presents:

THE PUBLIC SOUNDS

A Festival of Sound Art in Public Space

Free!

Public Sounds has been made possible, in part, by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with the generous support of The September 11th Fund.

Kabir Carter - Aug. 11 & 12, 18 & 19, throughout the day (by appointment only: contact Kabir to schedule an appointment) various public locations throughout lower Manhattan

Jessica Feldman - Aug. 11 & 12, 18 & 19, from 2pm to 6pm at the intersection of Frankfort & Gold Streets, under the overpass to the Brooklyn Bridge (Manhattan side)

Kaffe Matthews – Aug. 15 –19 from 11:30am to 3pm each day, at the World Financial Center Plaza

Leslie Ross – Aug. 11 - 19, throughout the day Ross will be riding her Cyclestrument around Battery Park and through the streets of lower Manhattan

Stephen Vitiello – Aug. 18th, 8pm at the Would Financial Center Plaza or Winter Garden.

Curated by Jessica Feldman

For two weeks this August, Roulette will present THE PUBLIC SOUNDS Festival: a group show of interrelated, public sound pieces throughout downtown Manhattan. The festival includes new pieces by Kaffe Matthews, Kabir Carter, Jessica Feldman, Leslie Ross and Stephen Vitiello with Molly Berg, all artists whose work is concerned with site-specificity, social issues and the engagement of the public. The festival seeks to re-imagine the way that our experience of the physical, political and historical presence of sound is affected by its context, and to achieve a new understanding of the sites and the sounds that can occur in, relate to, travel through and transform these contexts.

The works address the quality of sound as a medium of public art: it carries, it moves through space and time; unlike plastic objects, sound cannot be bound by walls. Even when we leave the origin of a sound, we carry with us the memory of it in our bodies. In this way, sound wants to transcend privatization. It exists in the air and water of the public city spaces surrounding us, waiting to be activated, carried, transmitted and remembered. It is a most salient feature of our social space. The works all recognize this essentially uncontainable quality of sound and seek to use sound to suggest a new means of interacting with and realizing their environment.

Kabir Carter: Presentity

In Presentity , Kabir Carter will meet with individuals (by appointment only) in public locations throughout Lower Manhattan. Each meeting will center around a person-to-person sonic event that is particular to time and place. Each encounter will include both improvised and fixed components and will be shaped in the moment. A variety of sounds, spatialities, energy flows, ideas, and states of presence will be revealed and shared. To make an appointment, please contact Kabir.

Kabir Carter's compositions, performances, and sound installations have been presented at Art Interactive, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Diapason, Dorsch Gallery, d.u.m.b.o. arts center, Jersey City Museum, PS122 Gallery, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Socrates Sculpture Park, and in public presentations throughout New York City.  Carter has been artist-in-residence at LMCC/Workspace: 120 Broadway, and has received awards from the American Music Center, Experimental Television Center, Media Alliance, and Rhizome.

Jessica Feldman: Overheard

2pm to 6pm, Located in the arch underneath the overpass to the Brooklyn Bridge at Frankfort Street and Gold Street (on the Manhattan Side)

Overheard seeks to break down the boundaries of private and public sound and information by examining the way that amplification and recording and broadcast technologies can facilitate or destroy these boundaries. The work turns private sounds into public property, secret information into common knowledge, makes obvious the hidden and hides the obvious, seeking to invert the intentions of surveillance and increase our individual and collective awareness of our community’s habits of listening, listening in and being listened to. For the piece, Feldman has collected hundreds of individual recordings of people from the area whispering their secrets (with the promise that the recordings will be broadcast in such a way that the person becomes indistinguishable from these secrets.) The voices are then slightly manipulated in time/pitch and the recordings are played back, layered and sculpted, many at a time, in the extremely resonant, extremely public space of the arched passageway. The resultant sounds fill the arch with a rich chorus of the echoes and ghosts of these voices, each of which is just on the verge of audibility/distinguishability in relation to the others. The piece poses the possibility of removing the danger of sharing information by bringing voices together, in public.

Jessica Feldman is an intermedia artist with a background in sound, sculpture and installation. She creates work that asks its audience to engage in dynamic relationships with their physical surroundings, with each other, with larger communities and with political questions. Recent pieces tend toward interactivity and often occur in extremely public or extremely private spaces. She makes use of sculptural materials, video and choreographic practices in addition to sound. Works have been performed, installed and exhibited internationally at art galleries, concert halls, public parks, city streets, tiny closets and the internet. Recent and upcoming venues include The Kitchen, The Museum of Contextual Amputations (ongoing online project), The Stone, The Tank, Chelsea Waterside Park, Tenri Cultural Institute and various outdoor locations. Her work has received grants/awards from the LMCC, the Max Kade Foundation, Columbia University and the Experimental Television Center, among others.

Kaffe Matthews: Viewing 1

11:30am to 3pm daily, At the World Financial Center (http://www.worldfinancialcenter.com/)

Viewing_1 is a work for headphones for the World Financial Plaza, New York City. Wireless headphones are distributed from a kiosk at the site, available to anyone who wishes to listen. The headphones broadcast sounds based on sonic triggers from the location, referencing clouds of passing horns and strings. Viewing is inspired by looking up in cities, made by Matthews using a walking and mapping technique she is developing for composition from her recent “Sonic Bed” explorations. Now in residence in New York City, she is recording and mapping daily routes throughout the area, creating a score based on site-specific sounds.

Kaffe Matthews is a London-based sound artist who is acknowledged as a leading figure and pioneer in the field of electronic improvisation and live composition. Currently she is directing the collaborative research project, Music for Bodies, for which she received the 2005 NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship. Kaffe is known for making site-specific works using self-designed software matrices and feedback within the space, the site then becoming her instrument. Her Sonic Bed_London, part of the Worldwide Bed Project, received an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica this year. She also has been making a growing body of composed works through collaborations with a variety of people, including community members from the site of her work and a wide range of interdisciplinary professionals. She currently is working with NASA astronauts researching the sonic experience of space travel. Her BAFTA-awarded work, Weightless Animals, uses kites and the weather on an uninhabited Scottish island. Weather Made is another site-specific public work of hers that uses taut wires strung through the Australian outback.

Viewing 1 is co-presented by and

arts>World Financial Center is sponsored by American Express, Merrill Lynch, Brookfield Properties, and Battery Park City Authority, with generous support from the Exchange Hotel and Lounge.

Leslie Ross: Excursions

In Excursions Leslie Ross will be riding her Cyclestrument around Battery Park and through the streets of lower Manhattan. Each performance will feature one or two original compositions that have been transferred to paper rolls for this mechanical instrument: some inspired by tradition organ grinder music, some indulging in the soundscape and lushness of fluted pipes. Where usually automated instruments play identical facsimile performances at each playing, with this instrument pieces will be partially controlled/influenced/interfered with by unexpected changes in speed of locomotion. The ever changing sound-source along with the accompaniment of city life will also have a constant effect on how it is heard.  

The Organ-Bike - the first in a series of Cyclestruments - will be taken out for a ride (dry weather permitting) on Thursday Aug 16 , Saturday August 18 & Sunday August 19 (click on day to view route and time). This is part of a Festival of Sound Art in Public Space sponsored by Roulette - check their website of other events.

The Organ-Bike will also be set up as a stationary bike on Tuesday August 21 at the Stone (corner o Avenue C and 2nd Street) 8pm where Leslie Ross will also play in two sets of duets with David Watson / Bagpipes and Michael Attias/ Saxophone.

Leslie Ross, bassoonist, improviser, composer and instrument-builder, has been creating and performing since the mid 80s.

Stephen Vitiello with Molly Berg: Flutter

8PM, At the World Financial Center: Winter Garden (http://www.worldfinancialcenter.com/)

Flutter is a performance during which 100 small, sound-producing objects, each with their own parachute, will be dropped from 150 feet in the air. The objects each have resonant or mechanically audible properties that will be heard as they fall, creating something resembling a free-falling Aeolian harp. For a brief time, the air and gravity activate the instruments, filling the space with sound. The piece is of both very short and very long duration: the actual event takes only ten minutes, creating a short but memorable spectacle, yet the instruments endure and continue past the moment of articulation.

Stephen Vitiello is a sound and media artist. In his work, he is interested in the physical aspect of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a spatial environment. Many of his recent works engage the outdoor and public presence of sound through field recordings. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum 52 (London,) The Project NY and Galerie Almine Rech (Paris.) Group exhibitions include the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Ce qui arrive at the Cartier Foundation (Paris) and Greater New York at PS1. In 1999, Vitiello’s LMCC-sponsored WorldViews residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center resulted in a site-specific sound installation, which has been broadcast and exhibited internationally. New media productions include work for the Internet, Sound Archive 7.01-7.31.01 for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Tetrasomia, for the Dia Center for the Arts. Past performances venues include The Tate Modern, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, The Kitchen, the Whitney and participation in per/Son, Cologne. As a Media Curator, he curated the Sound Art component to the Whitney's exhibition The American Century: Art and Culture 1950-2000, Young and Restless a video program for the MOMA and New York, New Sounds, New Spaces at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon.

Flutter is co-presented by and

arts>World Financial Center is sponsored by American Express, Merrill Lynch, Brookfield Properties, and Battery Park City Authority, with generous support from the Exchange Hotel and Lounge.