Joel Rust

For more information, and a longer demonstration, see this page.

CITIZEN is an interactive installation about how we hear urban soundscapes, and a meditation on noise, clairaudience, memory, and conformity. The visitor explores a fantastical city soundscape which has been created from recordings by a range of instruments; they choose an action or destination through a simple graphical user interface and the soundscape changes around them. For more information, see this page.

This is a ten-minute excerpt of a generative sound installation.

Shanghai's rapid transformation has left it an uneven city, struck through with contrasts — not least in the aural realm. Its sound spaces vary from rich to bland, westernized to traditional, loud to quiet, wild to anesthetized. This piece features eleven recordings from the Huangpu, Pudong, Jing'an and Xuhui districts, presenting the left channel of one against the right channel of another, switching between different combinations that flatten or exaggerate the city's asymmetries.

At the inception of this piece was Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photograph Anonymous Sculptures (Gas Tanks), from 1972. The couple’s artistic output comprises gelatin silver prints of isolated units of industrial architecture, organized into grids of related structures. Removed from their contexts, the four gas tanks displayed here can be appreciated for their presumably unintentional aesthetic interest, and the cumulative effect of the series both highlights the repetitively monolithic constructions that are necessary for even the most mundane aspects of a society’s infrastructure and magnifies the differences between them.

Gjallarbrú is named in the Poetic Edda as a bridge ‘thatched with glittering gold’ over the last of eleven rivers on the road to Hel (the Norse underworld); this work shares this synthesis of the bright and dark. It is formed of four spans—one for each gas tank—and, whilst each span has a separate structure, they are unified by a common direction.