Receivers

Listening Posts

Industrial Waste Pool

2006-2007

Receivers, Listening Posts, and Industrial Waste Pool are architectonic objects to transmit and receive worldly and otherworldly music and/or information. They soak in, suck up, and give off. They are objects of and for meditation and introspection, as well as arenas for looking out at the galaxy or listening to alien news ('foreign' is earthly as well as unearthly; it's across the river, across the ocean, across the solar system).

The three pieces--Tree of Satellites, Listening Posts, and Industrial Waste Pool--underscore relationships between exterior and interior architecture, public and private arenas. While the sculptures of Tree of Satellites receive and conduct light and sound like a tree's leaves, a conceptual photosynthesis-- a kind of aural-synthesis. All the 'satellites' are sculptures made from satellite dishes, but modeled and hewn away from their prefabricated look.

Listening Posts, structurally akin to flutes and organs, listen to the random white noise of the universe, near and far, creating their own, silent music of the spheres, while the Industrial Waste Pool transmits AM news broadcasts in seventeen languages, as a kind of apotheosis in the face of industrial, ecological disaster, the beauty of organic form, the cacophony of human messaging that we rely upon, and the solitude of a graying Earth. Instead of a drain for toxins pouring down into sink-holed terrain, mass media beams up radio voices from underground.

Tree of Satellites - The tree is laden with satellites (leaves), which are receivers of radio waves and other frequencies of sound and light. Seven 18” satellite dishes, painted in epoxy, eggshell-enameled finishes of light frog green in a large Sculpture Park tree. Listening Posts - Three satellites, made of 24 “ PVC tube poles, satellite dishes, and receivers will be installed as stand-alone sculptures along the river. One 36” satellite dish and two 24” satellite dishes. Industrial Waste Pool - A 6' satellite dish will be set into the ground to provide an obverse shape to the tree and satellite posts, an industrial waste pool typical of chemical plants. But it will emit, from a breathing hole at its center, a streaming broadcast in seventeen languages, probably morning news broadcasts, suggesting the global chatter that consumes our spheres of hearing or sound and meaning from beyond our natural listening channels.

Socrates Sculpture Park was an abandoned riverside landfill and illegal dumpsite until 1986 when a coalition of artists and community members, under the leadership of artist Mark di Suvero, transformed it into an open studio and exhibition space for artists and a neighborhood park for local residents. Today it is an internationally renowned outdoor museum and artist residency program that also serves as a vital New York City park offering a wide variety of public services.

Socrates Sculpture Park is the only site in the New York Metropolitan area specifically dedicated to providing artists with opportunities to create and exhibit large-scale work in a unique environment that encourages strong interaction between artists, artworks and the public. The Park's existence is based on the belief that reclamation, revitalization and creative expression are essential to the survival, humanity and improvement of our urban environment.