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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Core Sample
Teri Rueb
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“Core Sample” is a GPS-based interactive sound walk and corresponding sound sculpture that evokes the material and cultural histories contained in and suggested by the landscape of Spectacle Island. The piece engages the extended landscape of Boston Harbor as bounded by the new Boston Institute of Contemporary Art building on the downtown waterfront, and Spectacle Island, a former dump and reclaimed landfill park visible just off the coast. The two sites function dialogically, questioning what is seen versus what is heard, what is experienced versus what is represented artifactually.
20th century waste and recycling industries had reduced Spectacle Island to a toxic state such that it was closed in the late 1950s. Recently capped with tons of excavation material from Boston’s Big Dig Tunnel Project, the island is now a public landfill park.
Visitors to the island borrow small computer / headphone units equipped with GPS and wander the island to hear sounds inspired by the island’s complex material and cultural history. Sounds play back automatically as the GPS senses the visitor’s movement in the landscape. Over 250 sounds are spatially and thematically organized according to elevation, evoking a metaphoric core sample. Open-cell headphones allow blurring to occur between actual and prerecorded ambient sound. Abstract sounds and musical compositions are sparsely punctuated with occasional passages of spoken word, dissolving boundaries between surface and core, natural and artificial, industrial and organic, past, present and future.
Visitors to the Founders Gallery at the Boston ICA encounter a ninety-nine foot sound sculpture that first appears as a railing installed along the length of the gallery overlooking the harbor. The sculpture, embedded with tactile drivers throughout, functions as a giant speaker. Sounds from the island installation quietly emanate from within the form at intervals corresponding to the “depths” of the metaphoric core sample. The sculpture invites an absent-minded touch as viewers lean on the railing to take in the panoramic view. The soundscape is so subtle that it may even be mistaken at times for ambient outdoor sound permeating the glass façade.
20th century waste and recycling industries had reduced Spectacle Island to a toxic state such that it was closed in the late 1950s. Recently capped with tons of excavation material from Boston’s Big Dig Tunnel Project, the island is now a public landfill park.
Visitors to the island borrow small computer / headphone units equipped with GPS and wander the island to hear sounds inspired by the island’s complex material and cultural history. Sounds play back automatically as the GPS senses the visitor’s movement in the landscape. Over 250 sounds are spatially and thematically organized according to elevation, evoking a metaphoric core sample. Open-cell headphones allow blurring to occur between actual and prerecorded ambient sound. Abstract sounds and musical compositions are sparsely punctuated with occasional passages of spoken word, dissolving boundaries between surface and core, natural and artificial, industrial and organic, past, present and future.
Visitors to the Founders Gallery at the Boston ICA encounter a ninety-nine foot sound sculpture that first appears as a railing installed along the length of the gallery overlooking the harbor. The sculpture, embedded with tactile drivers throughout, functions as a giant speaker. Sounds from the island installation quietly emanate from within the form at intervals corresponding to the “depths” of the metaphoric core sample. The sculpture invites an absent-minded touch as viewers lean on the railing to take in the panoramic view. The soundscape is so subtle that it may even be mistaken at times for ambient outdoor sound permeating the glass façade.
Sound design: Peter Segerstrom & Ean White; Scuipture: Teri Rueb with Michelle Fornabai; Fabrication: Charles Mathis; Commissioned by the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition “Art on the Harbor Islands”, June 23 - October 7, 2007
Teri Rueb (US) is a landscape artist whose work engages digital, architectural and traditional media and modes of production. Her large-scale responsive environments and location-aware installations explore issues of architecture and urbanism, landscape and the body, and sonic and acoustic space. She has been creating GPS-based interactive sound installations since 1996. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a full-time Associate Professor of Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design and is founder of the Open Air Studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts.