a few cool things to do

Andy Horwitz | November 6, 2013 |

A couple of years ago my friend Mary Ellen took me to hear Electric Kulintang at the Lincoln Center Atrium. EK is the husband/wife team of Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez. I was blown away by the music and we started a conversation that led to a project that took many years to come to fruition – Digital Sanctuaries, a mobile app soundwalk launching November 7.

It started with a conversation on a couch at LMCC, there was a concert at River To River in 2012, co-presented with Harvestworks, where Susie had a residency, and a subsequent preview concert of Digital Sanctuaries in River to River 2013, also co-presented with Harvestworks.

It was a fascinating process, starting from an idea of fixed sculptural installations that would continuously play sound and evolving the idea into a work of digital public art that would be portable, scalable and modular.

We fleshed out the root idea of finding/creating meditative space in urban landscapes, and expanded it. Since River to River has, at its mission, the goal of activating Lower Manhattan, we thought about how we could draw people through the landscape, bringing them into unexpected spaces to stop and have these transformative, meditative experiences.

At the same time I had been learning a lot about the history of Lower Manhattan and was interested in excavating those histories in a way that informed our experience of place. Susie & Roberto’s music practice involves using field recordings and indigenous music as source material interpolated with their original electroacoustic compositions. We imagined what it would be like for Susie & Roberto to work with local collaborators – artists, historians, architects, city planners, etc. – to develop new walking paths in each urban environment, drawing on the unique history, spaces and features of the city.

The original concept had some 24 sites but we decided that was too many, I lobbied for eight stations – for the eightfold path – but we wound up with twelve sites in Lower Manhattan, which can be accessed through the mobile web app.

The rich historical culture of Lower Manhattan will be music with sounds in honor of each city space including African burial grounds, Native American Indian Museum, Irish communities, Jewish communities, Chinatown, Castle Clinton the first port of entry for immigrants in New York City.

It took a long time and Susie & Roberto and their team persevered facing a lot of challenges, but it has finally come into being and I encourage you to go to Lower Manhattan November 7-10 and check it out. For details visit http://digitalsanctuaries.com/.

Tonight, November 6, is the opening of a new work by Maria Hassabi called PREMIERE at The Kitchen. This also was developed in part through the dance program at LMCC that offered a kind of “extended life’ model of new dance development, with site-based and venue-based iterations of the work created over lengthy creative residencies. We presented a very cool version of Maria’s work SHOW in front of the NYSE.