I put this installation together for a series at the Sea and Space gallery in Highland Park, Los Angeles in February of 2008. They asked us to create pieces for the “Endurance Van” which was a large passenger van parked at the curb outside the gallery. The idea is was to present works of extreme volume (loud or soft), duration (short or long), or sensation (overload or depravation) of some kind-with limited seating. There were shows going on inside the gallery itself but guests were invited to wander between the van and the gallery.
My piece focused on making each experience of this piece unique-in this case “extremely” unique or entirely unique-based on where you were sitting in the van as well as which recording you chose. At the time I was working in a theatre where we would sit in all of the different seats in the house in order to ensure that every person was enjoying the same concert experience. This, of course, was never possible due to the fact that amplified sound reaches each seat from a different angle and that there is an entire section of seats that falls outside the 5.1 speaker set-up. It was during one of these epic sound checks that I started to wonder how I could make a piece that set out to give every person an entirely unique experience from even the person sitting right next to them.
I took 4 different field recordings from various drives around Los Angeles, freeway, surface roads and with a variation on windows open and closed. I then set up my modest recording rig, an audio-transducer, Z4 recording drive and Garage Band, and listened back to my driving sounds while recording a delicate track of viola pitches and noises to highlight and blend the sounds of the road together. I chose a tuning for the viola for each recording as well as a particular sound palette or colour that complemented the drive. In some recordings I had a lot to say and in others there wasn’t a lot that needed to be added.
For the night of the performance I put a different track onto 4 tiny mp3 players and put them up on the wall along with the instructions and a set of headphones for each player. People were asked to take a player and a set of headphones to the van, sit in the seat buckle up and close their eyes. The sounds from the recording played while the real time traffic outside the van added the final layer to this sonic experience. The van itself shook in response to the traffic outside the gallery. I stuck small lights to the ceiling of the van above each seat so that the outside viewers could watch 4 strangers sit in a parked van with their seatbelt on and their eyes closed each enduring their personal sound world.