Synesthetech

Mixing board on the Bluhm Family Terrace, Modern Wing, Art Institute of Chicago, during grand opening festivities on May 16, 2009. (More photos here.)

In the previous installment of this field recording series, I included some recordings of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing while it was still under construction. Here’s the payoff, when Alex and I visited the Modern Wing on the day of its grand opening. Also, the next day I visited the MCA and made some recordings at Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your TIme” solo show.

1. Renzo Piano Speech at SAIC Commencement, Millennium Park (9:04, 19MB mp3)

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   On our way to the Modern Wing, we stumbled upon the commencement ceremony for the School of the Art Institute which was going on in Millennium Park. A friend of ours, Alicia Chester, was graduating so we hoped we’d bump into her, but the crowd was too big. Instead, we managed to stick around for a speech by Renzo Piano, architect of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. We also got to hear a redwing blackbird, a young boy fascinated by the sound of stepping on a drainage grating, and a Japanese family sitting down in front of us with several bouquets of flowers wrapped in crinkly paper.

2. Photography Gallery, Griffin Court and Pritzker Garden, AIC Modern Wing (6:16, 12.5MB mp3)

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   Interior and exterior sounds of the new Modern Wing, starting inside the ground floor photography gallery, then out into the Griffin Court entrance hall, and finally out a side door and into the Pritzker Garden, a gorgeous space which envelops you in the building’s architecture while still affording you a wonderful acoustic vantage point of downtown Chicago. Lots of traffic sounds echo around the space in a way that feels tranquil rather than bustling.

3. AIC Modern Wing Galleries 182-184, Cy Twombly, “The Natural World” (4:02, 8.1MB mp3)

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   Recorded during my second walkthrough of the Twombly show, when I went back in to take pictures on the (bad) advice of the security guard in the photography gallery. I got busted immediately (but not until I was able to take this picture), so I immediately switched my camera with my Zoom H2.

4. Olafur Eliasson, “Ventilator”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (3:07, 5.9MB mp3)

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   On to the MCA’s installation of Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your Time” retrospective…one of my favorite pieces was “Ventilator”, a room containing an electric fan hanging from the ceiling which whips around the room at a height of about six inches above the top of my head. Fun, scary, and sonically blissful. I thought I was being pretty slick by holding the exhibition program in front of my Zoom to hide it from the gallery guard (and help cut down on the wind noise); she probably just shook her head and kept walking.

5. Olafur Eliasson, “Beauty”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1:39, 3.2MB mp3)

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   Another Eliasson installation, “Beauty” is a dark room containing a dim spotlight and a hose on the ceiling which spouts a wall of fine mist that you can walk around. A gorgeous bit of white noise in a black space.

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