From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
From 9:00 pm to 11:00 pm on September 8-10 as part of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's annual Time-Based Art Festival (a.k.a. "TBA"), the Hawthorne and Morrison Bridges are serving a visual and auditory inspiration for an art project by Tim DuRoche and Ed Purver. “The Hidden Life of Bridges” will feature video projections (including profiles of some of the workers involved) onto the Morrison and audio recordings of sounds generated by people moving over the bridges. Audio composition can be heard from the sidewalk of the Hawthorne Bridge from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM every day from September 10th through October 9th. The audio can also be heard on the phone by dialing 503.713.5852, and the projections can also be viewed from Tom McCall Waterfront Park and the Eastbank Esplanade. Here's a video preview:
Recently Tim DuRoche answered questions via email about the exhibit:
I read that part of your inspiration came from routinely came from walking over the Hawthorne Bridge to work. Can you talk a little about your collective impression as you take that walk and what you see? Obviously you've got the river, the skyline (such as it is), the bridge itself, but I'd love to hear your take on that as a kind of everyday theatrical experience.
For a number of years, walking has been my major form of transport (that and Trimet), it’s one of Portland’s premiums—that ability to get from one side of the river to NE or SE easily. If you walk enough across the Hawthorne you can’t help but notice the hum of the bridge and experience the city in an intimately nested sort of way—part of that has to do with the fact the bridge is closer to the water than any of the other bridges and you really see the bowl of the hills, downtown and the river banks hugging the bridge.
From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)
This is my fourth project sited along the river (the first was another RACC-sponsored project, a site-specific dance with Cydney Wilkes in 2004 located just under the Marquam Bridge; the next was a performance work with spoken word artist Lisa Radon along two sides of the river, inspired by Morse code and semaphore, as part of Gallery Homeland’s Scratching the Surface show in 2006; in 2007 I was one of the artists involved in month-long art/place-making projects as part of Linda K. Johnson’s South Waterfront Artist in Residence program; and for the 2008 edition of Gallery Homeland’s Scratching the Surface exhibition, I made a sound installation on the East Bank Esplanade that dealt with the question that Urban Greenspaces’ Mike Houck says is his most frequently fielded question: “When will we be able to swim in the Willamette again.”
With all of my public work I’m really interested in the notion of the city as a large-scale structured improvisation—all around us are minimal structures that allow for maximal flexibility and varying degrees of discovery, joy and wonder…if we leave ourselves open to them. For me, walking is a form of meditation –you’re simply taking in and allowing sensation, sight, sound to pass through you. With both the SoWa project and this project I was very inspired by a piece of Whitman’s Song of Myself. In many ways it’s a great mantra for anyone interested in found sound or appreciating the ebb and flow of daily flow in an urban environment:
“Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
… I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night
…I hear the chorus, it is a grand opera,
Ah this indeed is music--this suits me.”
Being a musician and DJ, can you describe the kind of rhythmic musicality of the sounds one hears from these bridges? Whom might some of your musical or sound-artist inspirations been and what was it about Ed Purver that you thought would be right for this? Or vice versa?
Hidden Life of Bridges isn’t about rhythm per se– which I think you’re asking about because I’m a drummer. More and more I’m interested (in both my sound work and as a drummer) in suspension, sustain, and the notion of slowing time. Drumming and rhythm are very concerned with attack and decay, but if we begin to listen to the sounds around us, the way we encounter sounds like passing traffic, thrum of heavy machinery, birds flying past, is more nuanced than that.
The Hawthorne has incredible resonance and I wanted others to be able to (instead of just going from point A to point B) to perhaps consider stopping or slowing time to discover and appreciate the everyday music that the bridge manifests. The real impetus was to take the “choral” quality of the Hawthorne’s metal road-deck and “reharmonize” both figuratively and literally the bridge –so passersby might experience in a new way the bridge. Running the contact microphones that are under the road through audio effects processing (developed with the deft contributions of electronics programming/music-whiz Doug Theriault ) allowed me to build specific “chords,” create pockets of sustain and harmony, humanize and heighten the musicality of the existing structure. So it’s in effect less about rhythm than it is about trying to “give voice” to the bridge and hear its song.
From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)
The “hidden” lives of the bridges is about that, but it’s also about the miraculous old-school technology of bridge-building- the fact that a 101-year old vertical lift-span bridge is still doing its daily dance; and by incorporating the stories and voices of the engineers, operators, mechanics, maintenance workers, and inspectors who work these bridges into the “composition” it’s really about revealing the important arterial function and deeper meaning these structures have in our lives.
I’m not the first one to stick a mic on a bridge –there have been many, many projects in this vein. Bill Fontana’s project with the Tate Modern is one that springs to mind; the late sound artist Max Neuhaus’ work is another. I’ve also really enjoyed the “deep listening” approach to site and sound that artists like Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros deploy. Janet Cardiff’s audio tours are another- a great form of urban “juxtaportation.” I think however that what makes this project different from similar hey-let’s-put-a-contact-mic-on-a-bridge projects is it’s less about pure phonography or soundscape and is interested in the bridges as narrative, as a vehicle for “creative nonfiction”: one part audio-visual installation, one part interpretive public education.
From "The Hidden Life of Bridges" (courtesy PICA)
I came into this project not in the way you’d think—considering that it’s in my own backyard. Ed Purver approached me about doing it through one of those small-world exchanges that seem to happen more and more. I’d certainly seen the RFP for projects with the bridges through RACC and Multnomah County’s Intersections program (a unique artist-in-residence/public art series that animates the fulcrum of “the art of work/the work of art”), but at the time didn’t think I had the wherewithal to put anything together. Ed, who’s based in Brooklyn, had sent an email to some friends/colleagues asking if anyone knew a sound artist in Portland and my friend Aaron Landsman (who’s a member of Elevator Repair Service, who performed their “Gatz” at TBA some years back) said, “I don’t, but my friend Tim seems to know everyone in Portland and probably does.” I proceeded to give Ed names of every sound artist in town (Ethan Rose, Heather Perkins, Seth Nehil, etc.) except myself, and as an afterthought sent him links to some of my projects. As it turned out both Ed and I share a deep interest in the public realm and how (through media or sound) one might awaken in people a new found sense of wonder in structures and spaces they generally encounter inattentively.
What are some of your favorite bridges in Portland, in Oregon, or around the world? Have they always been an area of interest to you?
I love the Hawthorne Bridge—having now spent hours and hours up on the catwalk, underneath it, in the middle of it as it ascends the skyline—I don’t think I’ll ever tire of looking at it and experiencing it. I’ve always loved the St. Johns Bridge—it would be another wonderful bridge for a project—for a couple of reasons. One is that, as Miguel Rosales pointed out when he was trying to design a beautiful bridge for the new Milwaukie Light Rail line (before it was oatmealed by “value engineering”), the life under the St. Johns is as important as the activity and energy of life that occurs up above. Also with its cabling, one could engage accelerometers (as Fontana did at the Tate Modern) and really investigate the aeolian harp-like sonority of the bridge in a cool way. My other favorite bridge is easily the Brooklyn Bridge—you can’t argue with the lore, the vista or Hart Crane. It’s pure poetry.
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