Lewiston

(with Michael Brewster)

1982
408.74 m x 164.29 m
Wood chips, masonry, concrete, aluminum, electronics
Commissioned by Art Park, Lewiston NY

Not extant

Visitors walked along a wood-chip pathway that meandered though the now forested grounds of an abandoned and destroyed mansion. We made 196.29 meters of wood-chip pathways that led to three listening / viewing stations. The first, the forest station, was a large clearing preceded by a set of masonry steps flanked by an aluminum banister. Leaning on the banister caused a pounding, dieseling sound to issue from the top of a 9.14 meter tall, hollow but living tree. After exploring the three-minute hovering sound field, the viewers climbed to an approximately two-meter-wide concrete culvert pipe perched on the looming hillside of the “spoils pile” next to the forest station. The echo in the pipe pitch-shifted the sound of the climbers’ exertions and its form focused their view on two suburban homes across the way. Their opposite view, across the face of the spoils pile, was of a turquoise suburban pool diving board about 30.5 meters away, jutting out from the hillside. On the diving board the visitors were cantilevered high above the site and could look back into the forest that covered the old mansion’s grounds, or back through the pipe at the suburban homes. If they stepped on one of two foot switches out at the tip of the diving board, they would hear the sound of a chisel on stone ricocheting around in the forest canopy before it faded into the rustling wind and animal sounds of the ambient acoustic environment.

More at Michael Brewster’s Acoustic Sculptures site.