Word on the Street
Word on the Street is a VR work built up from actual words overheard on the summertime streets of New York — snatches of conversation initially recorded in the vicinity of Wall Street but then in other sectors radiating out toward the city’s farther reaches. These snippets are interwoven into a dense sound collage that serves as the basis for the mind-altering psychophysical processes unleashed in the work. Viewers find themselves immersed in a flickering and often explosive spectacle. The virtual sculpture visualizes the spatialized sound in real time, and so the virtual world rushes past them at the same speed as that of the often frenzied city. Viewers can even step into the visual maelstrom as it streams time from immediate future to immediate past. Darting within this vortex are transcriptions of each word, and since each new word displaces the previous one, these too rush by too fast for conscious reading. And yet the text unpicks the dense field recordings all the same, the precise pairing of eye and ear making for an alchemical dissolution — you feel, if for a fleeting moment, that you are inside each utterance.
Word on the Street continues a series of precisely coupled sound / image VR situations initiated by OpenEndedGroup (Marc Downie & Paul Kaiser) including Ulysses in the Subway (MoMA, 2017), in collaboration with Ken Jacobs, and Pockets of Space (Centre Pompidou, 2018) and Innermost (Ultima / Oslo, 2019), both in collaboration with IRCAM and Natasha Barrett.