The East River Project with Gretchen Bennett MP3 Download + Map
Length Variable
2006-2007


Exhibition History

Soundwalk 2007, Long Beach, CA
September 2006, International District, Seattle WA


Description

The East River Project, A collaboration between Gretchen bennett and yann Novak combines online downloads and direct street encounters to activate the public space of the neighborhood they inhabit, The International District. The web site is a base camp for the street installation, where you’ll find a downloadable map with the perimeters of the installation and a downloadable MP3, as well as instructions on it’s use. The order in which the walk should be experienced is completely open, so each view of the work is unique to the viewer, to preserve the element of discovery.

The MP3 contains field recordings made in Brooklyn and Manhattan. These source recordings have been combined and mixed in Seattle to produce a narrative soundtrack for the walking tour.

On the walking tour, multiple Day-Glo orange stencils supplant Pioneer Square concrete and Chinatown pavement with orange silhouettes of the Williamsburg Bridge, The Dominos Sugar Factory Tower and pit bull variety dogs, enabling viewers to experience their environment in a state of hyper-awareness, by referencing a parallel but different landscape. The stencils are made of the same marking paint used by municipal workers to mark gas mains, so the transplanted landscape elements blend with the surrounding street text. The Brooklyn images are dispensed in multiples, enabling them to live on, even as they are receding landmarks in their own Brooklyn setting.


Reviews

This limited edition CD-R is something of a souvenir from a soundwalk staged by Seattle artists Yann Novak & Gretchen Bennett. The concept behind the event was to superimpose the Brooklyn sonic landscape into there own city, compounded by stencils on the sidewalks of Brooklyn icons.  This CD-R renders the original concept somewhat moot through the fragmentation of the Brooklyn field recordings into a gentle snow of digital pixilation. The passing garbage trucks and barge blaring its horn in the distance intermingle with a synthesized urban din, and become simply non-placed signifiers for any major metropolis on the globe. Novak and Bennett’s blurred soundfield is non the less impressive, its glitched filigree amassing into a snowblind haze.  The original soundwalk (complete with map and audio) is available through there website; the deconstructed offerings of The East River Project Vol. 1 is presumably the kind of impressionistic, emotional sensibility that the two hoped their audio tour will impart.
– The Wire


Considered away from the physical space they were originally designed to accompany, both the Intermission and Auditorium discs are two parts of the same parcel, Eno’s On Land stripped of the land, music for empty airports. Intermission’s 60 (minute) cycle hum epitomizes both Brian E’s definition and Satie’s precepts regarding “furniture music.” The drones here simulate the respiration of a giant’s lungs, pensive movements of clammy air that assume fictional shapes, suggestive of things heard but unseen, tangible and palpable to the touch. Registers set at the intended low volume, this symphony of minimalist existentialism wreaks a subtly hypnotic havoc on the inner ear, and is totally immersive sans its tactile raison d’etre. Auditorium’s soundwaves ripple more malevolently—this invert “maximalist” music is the cochlea of that giant’s ear vibrating like an earthquake’s aftershocks. I can imagine that the fluttering bass frequencies grounding this recording made for uneasy listening in the art-space. At home, the surrounding affectation don’t get in the way of the speaker cones, which tremble under the weight of the steam blasts and disintegrating hisses that emerge from Novak and Droun’s hiccuping harddrives. The collaboration with Bennett, the 27-minute “Brooklyn in Seattle (altered),” continues Novak’s obsession with bringing cityscapes to febrile life. Using Bennett’s recordings of Brooklyn’s traffic noise, street tonalities and random urban didactics, Novak’s resultant sonic canvas transmutes the brick and mortar landscape into something alien and exotic yet puzzlingly familiar, Brooklyn as viewed through the tattered celluloid of Blade Runner, tics, wisps and clicks simulating a Gotham acid rain. Housed in an ultra-white digipak embossed in a bas relief of the lower borough, only 25 of these spectral jewels were minted—well worthy of acquisition.
– e/i Magazine


All of a sudden it's coming from everywhere at once. In one ear, an iPod recording of street sounds from Brooklyn—trains passing, distant shouts. In the other ear, fresh voice mail from a colleague. Straight ahead, an old photograph of this place, the Panama Hotel, where Japanese families once dropped off their life's belongings on the way to internment camps. Across the room, chatter between a barista and a regular, veiled by delicate music. Underfoot, the basement bathhouse that closed 56 years ago, its pitted marble baths and numbered wooden lockers for Japanese workers.

I suppose every moment could be sculpted this way, as a series of distant events and influences crossing, if only the center point were receptive enough. That is one premise of The East River Project by the artists Gretchen Bennett and Yann Novak. They've drawn me to this convergence by overlaying sounds and sights from Williamsburg, Brooklyn—along the East River—on Seattle's International District. Out the front door of the Panama Hotel are two faded orange stencils that resemble the arcane marks of city workers, made in the same construction marking paint. According to a map of the district with a legend of the six different stencils Bennett used in the project, these two are recognizable as the husky heads of junkyard dogs, even though at this point, only two pairs of ears remain on the blacktop as a marker that Bennett was here.

"It reminds me of Masaryk's shoes," Bennett says on a foggy morning. "When the Nazis destroyed the statue of the Czechoslovakian president, they left his shoes, because they couldn't blast them out of the side of the mountain."

Bennett isn't equating a meandering adventure through the ID with the rocky determination of an entire strain of European underdog nationalism. She's flagging the unheard speech of incidental monuments. And the ID, where both she and Novak live, is full of incidental monuments: the Spic n Span Cleaners sign "With Liberty and Justice For," the recorded bells playing at the door to a Buddhist temple, the ghost signs for Chop Suey Chow Mein and Dancing.

Bennett is a Northwest native, but for several years she lived in Brooklyn, across the East River from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and, still longing for the "fast-moving current of culture you're a part of there," goes back often. The East River Project has three locations: Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Seattle's ID, and the web. The tour begins in the neutral territory online, with a downloadable MP3 and map of the streets involved. There are no instructions and no explanations about where the symbols appear, where they've come from, or what their placement means, if anything. The tour superimposes one neighborhood on top of another, like a double-exposed photograph.

When John Cage made Imaginary Landscape #1 in Seattle in 1939, it had nothing to do with being outdoors. It made a new nature by stitching together layers of sonic experience: the true (live percussion), the false (recorded sound), and the trash (noise). The East River Project also combines three elements: Seattle now, Brooklyn then, and temporary street marks indicating something beyond themselves, some system that only a few understand. Only Bennett knows the system, with its index of chosen locations, including her favorite spots, and symbols—the junkyard dog, two standing pit bulls fighting, a sitting pit bull in profile, Brooklyn's iconic shuttered Domino Sugar factory, a television shot of the plane that exploded in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the message "Attention Vagabond" that she once saw scrawled under the Williamsburg Bridge. But the tour is not a puzzle. It's not a scavenger hunt where you find what you came for. It is a scattered alphabet that can only produce partly decipherable words. Pleasurable confusion keeps you going.

"Is that—?"

I've already asked Bennett not to answer my questions, so she doesn't respond.

We stop, and I, still wearing the earbuds, look up, waiting to see a plane pass overhead. Except I don't know if it's in the sky or in my ears. I've already been mixed up about birds and trucks.

The sound fades. I keep gaping. Bennett finally steps in to reassure me: It was up there, you just couldn't see it.
– Jen Graves (Hear Here, The Stranger)