2005 | site-specific intermedia performance and installation | collaboration with Charles Recher
45-minute live performance followed by an approximately one-hour installation, originally intended to last three hours | ten full-range channels and two subwoofers
December 2, 2005 | Plaza of the Arts, Miami Performing Arts Center—now the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts | Miami
Commissioned by the Miami Performing Arts Center during the construction of its new complex, Cars & Fish brought sound, moving images, performers, and architectural lighting into the unfinished Plaza of the Arts and across the façades of its two principal buildings.
The project was created with filmmaker and intermedia artist Charles Recher. Charles produced the moving images and designed the projections; I composed and performed the sound. Together, we developed a situation in which the two buildings, the plaza between them, and Biscayne Boulevard became parts of a single audiovisual field.
A PROCESSION INTO THE WORK
Cars & Fish was preceded by a parade involving musicians, students, stilt walkers, and costumed performers from throughout Miami-Dade County. Organized with the participation of the public schools, the procession entered the plaza and gradually gave way to the performance.
Several theatrical elements came from Charles’s work, including his robotic television and remote-controlled Fish School. Charles and I collaborated on the Hypersonic Flock, which later developed into a separate work.
A stilt performer wearing an elaborate white costume and carrying a large waving flag moved through the plaza while projections of colored fish passed across him. These actions were not tightly choreographed. They entered and departed from the larger situation independently, creating encounters neither of us could entirely direct.
MOVING AROUND THE BUILDINGS
During the forty-five-minute performance, high-contrast black-and-white images drawn from situations around Miami-Dade County circulated across the façades. Six 25,000-lumen projectors—three on each side of Biscayne Boulevard—covered the exterior walls with images that moved continuously counterclockwise around the buildings like a hurricane.
The projections formed a kind of surreal portrait of Miami. Their scale and movement could become overwhelming. More than once, Charles and I had to stop what we were doing long enough to look up and take in what was happening.
The projectors were stacked in groups of three on opposite sides of Biscayne Boulevard. Each stack was carefully aligned to function as a single source with a nominal output of 75,000 lumens, strong enough to carry the images across the street and onto the building façade.
The performance ended as the circulating images resolved into two opposing streams: cars traveled north across the façade of the Knight Concert Hall while fish swam south across the Opera House. This began the installation that gave the work its title.
LISTENING TO THE PLAZA
The sound system consisted of ten full-range loudspeakers and two subwoofers arranged as two opposing 5.1 systems. The speakers occupied the pedestrian bridge over Biscayne Boulevard and continued around the Plaza of the Arts, forming two semicircles facing one another across a site approximately the size of two football fields.
From a station on the overpass, I used two computers to perform the sound. One contained the library of recordings I had selected for the work. The other controlled two surround panners feeding the opposing loudspeaker systems.
Sounds could move around the plaza, travel from one building toward the other, or remain momentarily fixed at one of the ten principal loudspeaker locations. The live signals from the musicians were handled separately by the sound engineer hired for the event.
Months before the performance, I conducted an acoustical study of the plaza using a microphone suspended from a large helium-filled balloon. Rather than adding discrete resonant tones to the finished composition, I emphasized frequency components already present within my recordings that corresponded with resonances I had found in the architecture.
The distant sound of car wheels moving over pavement produced smooth, sustained sonorities. Through the Doppler effect, their frequencies moved in and out of alignment with the resonances of the plaza.
The repeated attacks and syllables of a toadfish call articulated other resonances. These relationships were subtle and could easily be missed amid the scale and activity of the event, but they allowed the architecture to enter into the sound rather than serve merely as its container.
THE THREE-SYLLABLE TOADFISH
Among the materials were some of my earliest underwater recordings, made in Biscayne Bay while testing a hydrophone David Dunn had brought during his first visit to Miami.
One recording contained a fish call I could not identify. After hearing marine biologist R. Grant Gilmore discuss the sounds of South Florida fish on WLRN, I contacted him and shared the recording.
He identified it as a toadfish, although its call did not correspond neatly with the species he knew. Where a familiar call appeared to end with two extended sounds—
coo-ru-coo, cóooo, cóooo—
mine added a third:
coo-ru-coo, cóooo, cóooo, cóooo.
Gilmore had not heard that particular call before, although he had recorded another multi-syllable toadfish in the Florida Keys years earlier. Its precise identity remained unresolved.
Here is what my recording sounds like:
CARS AND OTHER INHABITANTS
The sound library contained hundreds of recordings. The cars were often less dramatic than the fish: distant engines, tires against pavement, and the continuous movements of traffic.
Another important sound came from a cruise ship leaving the Port of Miami. I recorded its horn with a microphone that, at the time, was a substantial improvement over the equipment I had previously been able to use.
During the performance, an image of the ship appeared at approximately the height of the seven-story Opera House. When I introduced the sound of its horn, the correspondence of image, sound, architecture, and scale became almost overwhelming. I had to stop performing momentarily and look up. That remains one of the most affecting audiovisual experiences of my life.
PERFORMING WITH RECORDED HISTORIES
The live performance included Vicky Richards on violin, David Manson on trombone, and Davey Williams on guitar. Davey and Vicky provided relatively stationary points of reference while David moved through the plaza. His trombone could be heard acoustically by those near him and more broadly through the sound system, sometimes approaching the timbre and scale of the recorded ship horns.
Rather than giving the musicians a conventional score, I used sounds drawn from their own musical histories to invite them into the soundscape.
For David Manson, I used material from Re David, a gated piece whose noise melody was constructed from his trombone playing and musical fragments he had shared with me. For Davey Williams, I drew from many years of recorded improvisations and collaborations.
Before the performance, I recorded Vicky Richards in a session that functioned somewhat like a sound portrait. Her playing carried traces of her concentrated exploration of Indian classical music—its bends, sweeps, and characteristic movement between pitches.
I introduced these recordings as cues for the live performers. At times the accumulation seemed to be getting out of hand, but all three were sensitive and resourceful musicians. The work would quickly transpose itself into another territory. It was a great deal of fun to perform with them.
ONE HOUR WAS ENOUGH
The conclusion of the performance initiated what was intended to be a three-hour installation: cars continued traveling north across one building while fish swam south across the other, accompanied by the spatial sound composition.
The police had closed Biscayne Boulevard between the I-395 overpass and Fifteenth Street for the event. Approximately one hour after the installation began, they asked the organizers to reopen the road.
Charles and I were a little disappointed, but no one made much of it. The organizers, audience, police, and particularly the waiting drivers appeared satisfied. By then the work had already established what it needed to do. The additional two hours no longer seemed necessary.
WHAT REMAINED
The scale of Cars & Fish allowed me to substantially improve the equipment I used for recording and playback. It initiated my work with hydrophones and produced recordings that remain important within my collection.
More significantly, the project demonstrated how environmental recordings, architectural resonance, live performers, spatial movement, and projected images could meet without becoming illustrations of one another.
Its physical scale was enormous, but many of its most important acoustic relationships were delicate. The site was not simply filled with sound and images. It became an active participant in determining how those materials behaved and what they could become together.
The documentary video uses a soundtrack reconstructed from camera audio and should not be understood as an accurate recording of the sound composition.
HISTORY AND DOCUMENTATION
Letter of recommendation from Justin Macdonnell, former Artistic Director Carnival Center for the Performing Arts | August 9, 2007 | PDF
Carnival Center-Adrienne Arsht Center Press Release | PDF
PRESS
“You’re looking at the side of the Miami Performing Arts Center, under construction …, as a band plays under the direction of Gustavo Matamoros and video is projected on the wall facing Biscayne Boulevard.” — Franklin Einspruch, Artblog.net
Coverage: plugged art collective, miami art exchange, miami art guide, miami new times, facebook, bizbash
CREDITS
Created by Charles Recher and Gustavo Matamoros
Moving images and projection design: Charles Recher
Sound composition, environmental recordings, and live spatialization: Gustavo Matamoros
Violin: Vicky Richards
Trombone: David Manson
Guitar: Davey Williams
Additional theatrical elements: Charles Recher and Gustavo Matamoros
Commissioned by the Miami Performing Arts Center