When entering into our current exhibition by Ann Hamilton, there are many different sounds that confront the visitor, emitting not only from the speaker system in the building, but also from live elements in the space. One of the noises coming from both of these sources is a steady, rhythmic crackling. When you walk up the stairs to the Mezzanine level, you encounter the source of this sound: a population of small dark beans reverberating against a steel table. These elements, magically moving of their own volition, are the famed Mexican jumping beans.

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Visitors at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts give their impressions at the opening reception for stylus: a project by ann hamilton.

Artist Ann Hamilton, Composer Shahrokh Yadegari and the opera singer Elizabeth Zharoff create a recording for the installation of stylus.

To add a “sense of  humanity as well as mystery,” Shahrokh Yadegari explained last week, he and Ann Hamilton chose to incorporate a human voice into stylus’s primary sound composition. They talked with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and were introduced to the singer Elizabeth Zharoff. The three met at Jupiter Studios, a recording studio in downtown St. Louis, where Zharoff sang as Yadegari improvised using her voice and a computer music instrument he invented. The instrument is called “Lila,” a word that literally means “play” in Hinduism but implies creative freedom within a set of boundaries. Zharoff and Yadegari’s collaboration as well as Ann Hamilton’s installation seem to exemplify that concept quite nicely.

Shahrokh Yadegari, Composer/Sound Designer, and his assistant Toby Algya program player pianos for Ann Hamilton’s stylus. Yadegari describes how the instruments will be used during the exhibition.

When we think of the word “stylus,” what comes to mind nowadays is a touch pen used on a palm computer. The upcoming exhibition’s namesake has many denotations, though, such as a pillar or a tool used to engrave wax. As Matthias Waschek broached in the last “From the Director,” the meanings of “stylus” overlap and fundamentally relate to communication. My favorite image of a stylus is a record player’s needle, which magically emits music from a slab of vinyl. At Friday’s opening, you’ll be able to experience a similarly wonderful transmission of sound. Read the rest of this entry »

Art preparators mount bell speakers on top of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Shahrokh Yadegari describes what sounds will be called out to the neighborhood.

If you’ve driven by the Pulitzer in last couple of weeks, you’ll notice that the neon sign is gone, and there are now five bell speakers on the roof facing Washington Boulevard. They are, of course, for the upcoming stylus, an exhibition that focuses on the notion of calling, and they’ll soon be calling to St. Louis.

The speakers in fact originally came from church bell towers, so this won’t be the first time they’ve been used to beckon a community. However, this time the community will have a chance to contribute to the sound, which Shahrokh Yadegari, a composer and sound designer working with Ann Hamilton, explained in an interview last week.

“It’s kind of the sound of the community that will be used as a gesture of calling to others,” said Yadegari. Anyone, anywhere will be able to call an account the Pulitzer is setting up and leave a message, which may then be funneled off the Pulitzer rooftop. These recordings will also be played inside the building.

“The sound system is really complex,” Shane, our Chief of Installations, explained about stylus. The audio maze so far includes light sensors, speakers throughout the building’s ventilation system and two player pianos. Hamilton worked with Yadegari to a create a system that, according to Shane, is “integrated so much into the architecture that it turns the building into some kind of giant instrument.”

Apparently, I’m behind the times. I’d never heard of SketchUp until Ann Hamilton’s assistant Colin McDonald astounded me with the 3D sketching software this week. He showed me a layout of what stylus is to look like, which he made by adding images to a model of the Pulitzer someone uploaded here. Here is the Main Gallery plus white cubbies that stretch along the entire western wall and window:

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As you’ve seen on the blog over the past few days, we’re in the midst of installing stylus, a project by the artist Ann Hamilton.  But what is this exhibition all about?

If you could sum it up in one word (which you really can’t) “experience” would be high on the list.  “Immersive,”  and “interactive” would work too. Ann’s installation is structured around live acoustic elements, and like many of her installations, weaves together a range of media to produce an environment that engages your senses as you move through it.  Her work responds to the architectural presence and social history of the sites she works within, and she will be interacting with the Ando building in very distinctive ways, transforming each gallery into an engrossing audio and visual environment.  Without giving all of it away, here are a few of the elements you’ll discover in the installation:

A central focus is sound, which Ann has closely worked on with sound designer and composer Shahrokh Yadegari.  Visitors will be able to interact with the sound in a variety of ways – from using a stylus and a touch pad to “sign-in,” to a steel table in the Main Gallery with a rolling tray and a microphone.   Input from these elements will feed into either the speakers on the roof of the Pulitzer building or two player pianos situated in the Cube and Lower Galleries, which will then transmit the sounds.  There will also be record players throughout the exhibition, five rolling platform ladders with rotating projectors, jumping beans, taxidermy birds, a wall of cast paper hands that visitors can wear, concordance texts produced from the daily newspaper…. as you can see, there are many elements that will contribute to your overall experience.  The hope for these materials is to engage a relationship between the individual and the group, a single voice and a chorus, a silent book and a spoken reading, and finally, between a solitary listening and a collective hearing.