Gallery Audio Tour
Grayslake Campus:
T-Wing main corridor
Steve Waldeck
Passages | 2007.11 a-p
Audio Tour
In this audio clip the narrator describes Steve Waldecks's piece.
Narration by: Bill Devore
Length: 0:3:32 (three minutes and thirty-two seconds)
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About the Piece
Passages, 2007Multi-media
Number: 2007.11 a-p
Passages was funded through the Illinois Capital Development Board.
This polyptych of 16 units features interactive artwork by Steve Waldeck and computer-generated music created by Peter Gena. The images and music, together, attempt to capture a historic marker of a vanished house and the passage of time. Both Waldeck and Gena are instructors at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Intended order for viewing: from the main corridor of the Technology Building to the Library Atrium. The first set is comprised of outdoor scenes, and the second set, along the opposite wall, of interior views.
Narration Text
Passages, as a whole embodies a personal journey as well as a universal theme concerning the relationship between distant memory and current experience. The subject matter, an American Gothic farmhouse, is represented with multiple imagery units that provide glimpses of a single reality. Traveling through this corridor allows the passerby to sense the interconnectivity of the units, but in a distinct progressive order. Simultaneously, it also provides a metaphorical journey showing the relationship between memory and time, utilizing disintegration, reconstruction and reinterpretation of a unique human experience.The spacing of Passages’ sixteen imagery units creates structural elements that allow the individual to witness limited perspectives and voids, promoting noticeable opportunities to integrate his or her own personal repertoire of memories. Ambient natural sounds combine with swathes of melodic motifs that recreate the sense of memory-like visual flashbacks.
The music used in Passages is generated from a piece written by Charles Ives in the early 20th century, the Alcotts movement of the Piano Sonata #2—a tribute to the famous transcendentalists of Concord, Massachusetts. The movement is programmatic of the Bronson Alcott family home in Concord. This was at a time not too distant from when the architect would have designed the farmhouse documented here in Passages. In Ives’s music there are passages that grow from the opening motif of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (a favorite of the transcendentalists), in addition to fragments of family hymns and Scotch airs. In his Essays Before a Sonata, Ives refers to “the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.”
In its quiescent state an algorithm produces variations on a motif or phrase in real time. Prolonged viewing of selected individual scenes of Passages will trigger additional phrases, creating a layered effect. A large number of variations are possible, but repetition is a major structural element, as in Beethoven and in Alcotts. When the viewer recedes from a particular site the music fades waiting for the next approach and reverts to its original, simplified material. The images and music, together, attempt to capture a historic marker of a vanished house and the passage of time.
Works cited:
Adapted from Steve Waldeck’s artist’s statement for Passages.
