Can
You Hear Me?, 2004
39 x 10 x 15 feet
Site-specific
installation, The Sunshine Hotel, NY, NY
Commission, The New Museum, NY, NY
PVC pipe, mirror, wood, existing architecture and public phone, metal sign,
participants
Can
You Hear Me?, 2004 is a site-specific interactive sculpture
installed on the exterior of the building that houses The Sunshine Hotel,
one of the last remaining flop houses (Single Residence Occupancy) on
the Bowery. The piece was created for Counter Culture, a show
that the New Museum of Contemporary Art organized to inaugurate their
new neighborhood. The parking lot next door to the hotel is the future
site of the museum. I sited my piece at the Sunshine to explore the
complicated social dynamics of the situation and perhaps create an opportunity
for a person- to- person connection within an uncanny context.
The sculpture
is a functional alternative "telephone". It uses PVC pipe
and mirrors to make an aural and visual communication link from the
second floor lobby of the Sunshine Hotel, to the street below. Passers-by
on the street can call up through the tube and be heard in the Sunshine's
communal lobby area. If a resident chooses to answer the call and engage
in a conversation through the tube, the sculpture offers a space to
have a face to face conversation over a distance of 36 feet. The natural
acoustics of the PVC pipe amplify and carry the sound of each person's
voice, creating an aural proximity. At the same time, a periscopic mirror
system in the tubes carries the image of the person's face you are speaking
to, but it appears very small and upside-down, visually emphasizing
the distance between the two conversants.
The title references
the first message heard through wire transmission during Alexander Graham
Bell's early experiments with telephone communication.