Excited! 4: The Visitors
There’s a new album released on iTunes today that I’m positively giddy about, and it’s a $9, 27-minute (-and-6-seconds) single song.
I’m not the only person who can barely contain themselves. “I’m so excited!!” tweeted another colleague, after hearing news of the impending release. “No joke, number 1 on my post-[conference] list was ‘find the song…’,” she wrote. Some of my coworkers are even planning a listening party.
And I’m not sure I can, in good conscience, recommend it to you.
* * *
“I think it’s called The Visitors? Some Icelandic artist.”
It was the first evening of a museum conference. We’d arrived at The Broad, the striking new art museum in Los Angeles that looks like, well, it looks like this, when you’re looking up at the side of it.
The inside feels like a Bond villain lair. It’s the kind of architecture you didn’t think they made anymore. Halfway up the stairs to the second floor, a rounded portal lets you peek inside the collections vault, as if the racks of paintings were a reef in an aquarium. If you take the elevator, it’s cylindrical, glass overhead and encircling you, and rises into the middle of a giant hall on the third floor.
While this Great Glass Elevator was amazing, it was not as amazing as The Visitors.
At this point, I’m sure I’ve overhyped it, and you’ll be disappointed, but this is not the point.
I’m hemming and hawing here, not sure what to tell you, because I want you to see this installation for yourself. It’s coming to the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn in October.
When you do see it, mind you, you have no way of knowing at what part of the hour-long loop you’re going to enter; often as not, you will find yourself in medias res—smack dab in the middle of things.
As you push aside the curtains and walk into the darkened room, you find yourself looking either at a woman in a nightgown with a cello, sitting on a cot at the top of the stairs, or (if you went through the opposite entrance) a drummer with full kit in a kitchen, the cabinets behind him packed with porcelain.
OK. Huh. (Nine screens, all huge.) They’ve got headphones on. So do all the others! Musical instruments? Accordion, pianos, guitars, electric guitars. Bathtub? (In the gallery, nine speakers projecting the sounds of each room.) Oh! They’re in the same house?!!!! Look! In the background behind him…now look through the doorway behind that guy…
And as you have these dawning realizations, you can’t help but—
Before I continue, I need to point out a wonderful wonderful thing that The Broad did when they set up this installation. If you’ve ever seen a travelling exhibition at multiple museums, you may have noticed that the museum tries to keep the same spatial narrative, but they have to work with the floorplan of the spaces they’re given. As I understand it, museums generally photograph a space, then digitally mock it up, to get signoff to host the exhibit. So in one museum, an exhibit might feel cramped, in another it might feel aimless in a giant space; in one museum, you might turn the corner and be surprised; in yet another, you might be able to see that surprise coming two chambers away. (Hopefully not.)
In the case of The Visitors, unlike some of its previous venues (I was told), it is physically impossible to see all of the screens at once. Two of the screens are on opposite sides of a wedge that cuts into the middle of the gallery.
You have to either circulate between the two halves of the rooms, trying not to get in anyone’s way, or just pick a spot, and accept that you might miss out on some of the details. And since the installation is an hour long, and all of the screens are shot continuously and playing out simultaneously, in an interrelated way, there’s a perpetual sense of missing out. Much like off-kilter cinematography, the staging heightens the mystery, and the mystery heightens your emotions.
Where were we?
—grin ear-to-ear, your internal organs resonating as the music swells and things start coming together.
“Just wait,” whispers another colleague who’s seen it before, “it ends perfectly. And you have to see how it starts.”
When the screens finally go dark, you know you have to stick around to see how it all began.
* * *
All of this is a long and meandering way to say that you might not want to spend $9 on a 30-minute song, and it definitely won’t mean much to you. It’s repetitive Americana, sung by a band from Iceland. It’s mixed down from nine speakers to two. It’s described as “nihilistic feminine gospel music.” (I have no idea what that means, but it fits.)
However, go see The Visitors in person, and it will become something else entirely...something glorious. You’ll wait until midnight on the night of its iTunes release to download this big, dumb, heartswelling song.
In large part, because of a gallery floorplan.
Thanks to Drew and Scott and everyone for telling me to go see it. 🏚
Holy cannoli, y’all. It’s time for a progress check! What’s happened in the world of codenamed projects since last time?
- [⋯] ATREYU reached the end of another two milestones and is finishing another QA sprint. Had a two hour meeting with stakeholders to bring everyone up to date on all the moving parts. We’re hoping to have a beta version to test by next month. (ALSO! Discovered why git commit messages are present tense imperative verbs: a few letters of brevity.)
- [⋯] Checked out five books from the library for SPACE MOUNTAIN. Eva Zeisel, Fritz Zwicky, kinetic sculpture. So many web bookmarks, past presentations, and academic papers to read through again. Carving out a schedule so that I’m not starting my slides on the plane there.
- [⋯] Learning an awful lot in collaborating on JULIAN, a project involving calendars. Have been riding along on interviews and helping to figure out the data model on whiteboards and google docs.
- [⋯] Willingly roped into brainstorming meetings with a few museums for MAXELL. Will need to start mapping out an API soon.
- [→] Helped put in a proposal for QUIMBY (a variation on one of the first in-gallery projects I worked on). Waiting to hear back.
- [→] No time yet for RIO GRANDE, but I did manage to obtain a Raspberry Pi 3.
- [→] COLLINS is bumped to the bottom of the list, but the holes were re-desoldered, and new headers are soldered on, and hopefully it all still works when I get to it.
- [→] Just hit 125 straight days of Russian language in Duolingo. No fancy code word for that, although I'm sure it helps on the DAMERON moonshot.
- [→] Collaborated on proposals for MUSCULUS and SYD for a future conference.
- [✓] EOMAIA is finished! There was a poster. (I’ve got another tinyletter drafted about it.)
- [✓] HANDSFORD is launched! We worked on an augmented multimedia map for elementary school classrooms remotely touring a museum via a telepresence robot. Since last time, we figured out how to let the tour guide use a smartphone to trigger content to play on the classroom’s screen, using WebSockets, and implemented a simple local username / password login. (Also learned what “salting” and “hashes” are, when they’re used in the context of cryptography…and not referring to diner breakfasts.)
- [✓] MAILLARD is launched! We’re two months into Code Kitchen, a San Diego Creative Coding meetup. Since last tinyletter, I’ve learned how to set up a web page on GitHub, taught folks how to make twitterbots (and found out that our lesson was used in the UK!), and learned in detail how Instagram filters work. Already putting together a long list of things to learn/teach. Any suggestions?