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Sounds Like a Monument

In January, 2006, Smudge Studio collaborated with WOMR, Outermost Community Radio for Cape Cod, on the Marconi Machines Project.  This collaboration included a simultaneous live radio and web event, featuring featured audio documentation and sound-scapes that we created during a two-day transmission arts project.  We used audio recording, video, photography, and super 8 to respond to Marconi beach as a place that is always in the process of becoming, unfolding, forming, and re-forming. 

During this collaboration with Bob Seay, he suggested that we consider proposing a project for the Pilgrim Monument, specifically, something that would encourage visitors to make return visits to the monument.

The project we propose here is in response to Bob’s suggestion.  It is entitled:  Sounds Like a Monument.  It offers visitors and artists opportunities to use sound to “performatively respond” to their experiences of the unique interior space, surrounding environment, and history of the Monument. 

Sounds Like a Monument is inaugurated by a summer event that involves visitor interaction.  This inaugural event is followed by an ongoing program that involves sound artists, a web exhibition and broadcasts on WOMR.

With the installation of simple materials, Smudge Studio transforms the interior space of the Monument into a 200-foot tall wind chime.  At the top of the staircase, we attach a rope that hangs to the bottom of the monument.  All along the vertical rope, at the level of every other landing, we attach sets of wind chimes—varying from large, bass note chimes to small, tinkling chimes.  Each of the sets of chimes is attached to a rope that runs horizontally to the stairway wall that is level with the chimes.  We invite visitors to sound the chimes by pulling on the horizontal ropes as they ascend and descend the monument.  At any given moment, visitors may experience silence, the sounding of one set of chimes, or the sounding of many sets of chimes.   Visitors may collaborate in creating compositions of sounds, using the chimes to call and respond up and down the monument, and playing with the time lapses between sounding and hearing across vertical distance.  

We will document visitors’ spontaneous compositions and interactions with the project via audio recordings, photographs, and video.  These documentations will exhibited as part of the Sounds Like a Monument ongoing program (described below).

Smudge Studio creates a website called www.soundslikeamonument.org.  We send out a call to sound artists to create performative responses to their experiences of the Pilgrim Monument, its surrounding environment, and its history. Artists submit their work via the website.  Smudge Studio curates submissions.  Selected works are performed on an automated sound system installed in the interior of the Monument.  Sound-scapes and sound-art pieces (five minutes or less in length) are performed each half hour during visiting hours.  Additional programming is possible in conjunction with the performance of various artists’ work.  Selected works are archived on www.soundslikeamonument.org for web-audiences to experience.  They are also offered to WOMR for broadcast as part of their sound-art offerings.

We would welcome the chance to explore these ideas with the Monument’s administrators, and to collaborate on a timeline and budget for the project.

Smudge Studio (www.smudgestudio.org) is a non-profit media design, production, and distribution studio.  Kruse and Ellsworth create experimental fusions of new media, experience design and communication design in a variety of forms, including websites, mediated learning environments and public events and experiences. Their artistic practice consists in responding to the world as always having the potential to become else.  They use various media to document how topographies of place and people (including each other as collaborators) look, sound, feel and move when they are addressed as in the making.  Jamie Kruse is an artist and designer living in Brooklyn.  She has a BFA in Visual Communication and an MA in Media Studies.  Elizabeth Ellsworth, a part-time resident of Provincetown, has a Ph.D. in Communication Arts and teaches media theory and practice in the Media Studies Program at The New School University in New York.  Smudge Studio recently launched www.EarthShapes.org, an online “studio for the collaborative environment,” which smudges the intersections between education, art, design, and media.