AudioWinds # 1
Thursday, May 14 through Sunday, July 18, 2010
Opening: Thursday, May 20th at 6pm with a short artist’s talk
Click here for Audiowinds #2

Moore Terrace (2nd-floor entrance), Chace Center, RISD
20 N. Main Street, Providence, RI. The work can also be accessed through the College Building arch, located on College Street between Benefit and N. Main Street.

AudioWinds #1, an audio art installation by Rhode Island–based writer, storyteller, and radio host Marc Levitt, will be presented on the Moore Terrace at the second-floor entrance to RISD’s Chace Center. The piece, which can be experienced between May 14th and July 18th, is a multi-channel orchestration of sounds that might have been heard at this location over the last few centuries, from before contact between local indigenous people and European settlers to the present time. The sounds have been taken from their historical context and used as ‘notes’ in this orchestration. This spot has, at various points, served as the site of a Narragansett Indian settlement; a homestead to settlers as they arrived from Europe; a place with ties to slave-based labor; a location for stables, factories, and rooming houses; and the center of Providence’s commercial district. (See site’s history here)

New: Click here to listen to Marc Levitt's Audiowinds (21 minutes)

While unknown to Mr. Levitt before he began his composition, his ideas to ‘harvest’ and then to disengage sounds from their environment have a strong resemblance to the ideas of French composer Pierre Schaefer’s ‘musique concrete’, who emphasized starting composition from the ‘concrete’ sounds within one’s environment and to the work of Canadian composer/teacher Murray Schaefer who in addition to introducing the concept of soundscape coined the term schizophonia in 1969, the splitting of a sound from its source. We hope that as you listen to AudioWinds #1 you will imagine that the sounds of the last 500 years are blowing around like leaves in the wind and both haphazardly and consciously combine in ways that are surprising, lyrical, humorous, boring and shocking and that AudioWinds helps you to listen to your everyday environment in those ways as well.

Marc Levitt was the first recipient of the Tom Roberts Award from the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, and in 1995 received the New Genre Fellowship from the Rhode Island Council for the Arts. His radio show, Action Speaks, co-produced with AS 220 and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, has been heard on more than 100 stations around the United States. Levitt has worked as a performer and consultant in 40 countries around the world.
James Moses, a sound artist, radio engineer, and editor and technical director with Brown University’s music department, is the sound engineer for Audio Winds. Mr. Moses is also a Member of planning committee for Pixilerations, part of the ‘First Works Providence’ arts festival – digital media works from artists associated with Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design presented in collaboration with the City of Providence.
Viera Levitt, formerly director and curator of a public art museum in Trnava, Slovakia, and currently the director of the Knight Campus Art Gallery at CCRI, served as the curator for the project. Viera Levitt has curated shows in Europe and the United States, in galleries, museums, moving trains and recently, through the Hera Gallery, in a truck that traveled throughout Rhode Island.

For more information contact Marc at MarcLevitt@aol.com or 401.954.4568

History of the Neighborhood

Listen to Marc Levitt's Audiowinds #1 (mp3 file)
(21 minutes)

Listen to
RI art installation aims to "remember" sounds By Bob Seay (2010-07-12)
© Copyright 2010, WRNI

Download
Press Alert, April 2010

Some of the sounds
used in AudioWinds #1
Wooden Doors
Shower
Crickets
Katydids
Whippoorwills
Saw
Bellows
Church Bells
Trolley Bells
Porcupine
Horse and carriage
Bacon frying
Fire
Thunder
Rain
Scraping of arrowheads
Typewriter
Smithy working
Boiling Water
Rotary dial telephone
Musket

Reputed to Be the First Woman to Vote in a National Election, Lived Disguised as Man, in Providence and once worked at the What Cheer Stables, located on the block where the Chace Center is today!

Thanks

The Rhode Island State Council for the Arts

The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities
Judith Tannenbaum,
The Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, RISD Museum

Douglas Doe and Andrew Martinez,
RISD Archives

Phil Lavallee,
Head of Exhibits, Mashantucket Pequot Museum

City of Providence Archives

James Brayton Hall,
Assistant Director,
RISD Museum

Amy Pickworth,
Marketing and Publicity Associate,
RISDMuseum

Stephen Wing,
Manager of Installation,
RISD Museum

Mark Moscone,
Director of Exhibitions,
RISD Museum

Eric Hanson,
Construction Project Manager. RISD Museum