Sound and Sight Trumpets for the East River
Brooklyn Artists Waterfront Coalition, Brooklyn, New York, Empire Fulton-Ferry State Park, 2006.
One trumpet mounted on a swivel clamp and another—for children or persons in wheel chairs— tethered to the railing. Materials: steel, polymerized hydrostone colored with pigments found on site, sealed with tung oil and resins, mounted trumpet: 45" L x 16" dia., tethered trumpet 18" L x 12" dia.
These trumpets may be used to activate the senses in several ways: to amplify sound, project the voice, convey quiet whispers or to edit views of the surrounding environment. One can rotate the trumpet to listen to the sound of the water crashing on the rocky shore or other sounds coming from the river such as the voiceover on the Circle Line tours. Viewer/participants may discover that they can speak softly to each other with a mouth on one end of a trumpet and an ear on the other. Trumpets may also can function as megaphones; and lastly they can be used to edit particular views, for example, the Brooklyn bridge or the shore line or the Statue of Liberty. These are simple objects facilitating deeper connections with the surrounding environment. A child, or a person in a wheelchair can lift the smaller trumpet tethered nearby for these uses also.
VIEWER RESPONSE
From an email from New York composer Noah Creshevsky
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006
"David and I took four of our friends to see your piece today. We walked over and I picked up one, and then the other, putting them to my ear—first one ear, then the other ear. They make a most beautiful, large and sometimes small, deep, secret, creepy sound. They change the perception of what's happening around us in ways that add depth but also create mystery and a certain distance. They're big and small at the same time—maybe that's some of what you mean by making two of them, one larger than the other.
THEN, we sat down on the nearby benches and watched other people deal with your work. To my great surprise, the first person to walk up to it used it as a megaphone. I have an unusually focused mind (am stupid in some ways) and so that obvious and reasonable approach had not to occurred me at all. It surprised me to see how foolish I was to not think of holding these up to my mouth. And so it went. Numerous people took pleasure from your work. About half saw it as something vocal. The rest (the RIGHT ones—I'm kidding, of course) saw them as something to be used to HEAR (magnify and alter) the outer world."