Waterworks 2023 – Mike Bullock: Whip-poor-will, an installation for multiple loudspeakers
Non-Event and the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum present
Waterworks 2023 – Installations:
Mike Bullock: Whip-poor-will, for multiple loudspeakers
Wednesday, April 19 – Sunday, April 30, 2023
Resonant Bodies will be available during regular museum hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 11-4pm / Saturday, 11-3pm
Metropolitan Waterworks Museum
2450 Beacon Street, Boston
Free, but please consider making a donation to the Waterworks Museum
There is limited parking at the museum. Please use the T (Reservoir or Cleveland Circle stops on the Green line), if possible!
Please note: masks are strongly encouraged
Non-Event is pleased to present Mike Bullock’s installation, Whip-poor-will, for multiple loudspeakers as part of the Waterworks 2023 Festival.
Whip-poor-will is part of a series of pieces called Ephemerospheres: the spheres of temporary, fragile, non-human sound that occur outside of, and on the fringes of, human perception. Immersive storms of sound you can’t hear or don’t notice, that come and go in the course of a few weeks or a few hours. Whip-poor-will starts, as its source, with several ephemeral sound spheres of early summer in New England: the endangered little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus), who echolocates at 110 dB while foraging insects; several amphibians who are only heard for a few weeks in spring and summer, including the wood frog and spring peeper; and the whip-poor-will, a bird who sings only at night, but so continuously that the cessation of their onomatopoeic song makes your ears prick up.
Nature sound recording is often called an act of capture, invoking histories of colonization and resource abuse - historispheres that are sometimes invisible, sometimes censored, but not ephemeral. They endure and infect the spheres of the real, of ecologies and societies, of how we speak and how we understand, or resist understanding.
But “capture” is misleading: sound cannot be forced to hold still. Recording is an act of writing; a sound recording device is writing a story (in magnetism or math) of what the microphone hears, a story that it can read back aloud through a speaker. Making sounds by hand that parallel these stories (with instruments, objects, voice) can be an act of drawing; so Whip-poor-will also includes some of these sound drawings to accompany the story, all of them written and re-written through digital means, then spoken aloud through self-made loudspeakers. The speakers used in this installation are the same ones I originally made for my Wave Field Synthesis array, but with flexible application in mind.
For a different perspective on the installation, which centers on Waterworks' giant Allis Engine, consider signing up for one of the museum's All Access Tours. These tours take place on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons. These tours take you into the sub-basement and up onto the machines. Check here for more information and to purchase tickets for the tours.
About the Artist
Mike Bullock is a composer and environmental sound recordist based in Providence, RI. He has been creating electroacoustic and improvised music since the mid 90s, and has performed across North America and Europe. Bullock has received grants from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. As Ears In Space, he also designs and builds wave field synthesis and other spatial audio arrays.
Bullock's work has been presented at ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia, and the Park Avenue Armory in NYC; Fylkingen, Stockholm, Sweden; Instants Chavirés in Paris; Café OTO in London; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Goethe Institut Boston; and EMPAC in Troy, NY.
Waterworks 2023 is presented with the support of a Live Arts Boston grant from The Boston Foundation, a Festivals Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a local cultural council grant from the Brookline Commission for the Arts.
Non-Event would also like to thank the sponsors for Waterworks 2023:
