Intersections is centered around the transformation of a piano whose very existence and history was to provide music in an accompanist studio in New York City. Its current state is such that it is able to make sounds but those sounds it makes are not acceptable to traditional music anymore. We have had many many cases of storied instruments owned by exceptional performers with grandiose histories,
but what are the stories to the instruments that are the workaday instruments? What are the stories of the materials that comprise the piano? The instrument is in need of repair and the cost to return it to its original state as well above $12,000. For me, the instrument has transcended its normal parameters as a tool to transmit standardized pitches and frequencies to an audience. I view it more as an elderly being, who, due to extensive life experience, is reaching the end of the path for which it was originally designed. It is a meditation on the human state, and specifically the period of decline. In creating this project, I have decided to not repair the instrument, but to manage its decline much in the way that assistive technologies in the medical field are able to alleviate suffering but not solve the root cause of the disease. They will take the sounds of the instrument and transform them into visual information. Microphones will be hooked to the governing computer managing the transformation of the data. The public will be invited to add their own words, stories, and recollections of their own family members who have either passed on or who are in decline. The instrument itself will, through my research into its history will also be a repository for its own information and history. This information will be stored by the computer, but it will be accessed through playing the piano. We are at the beginning of this project. The piano will act as a repository of information about the communities that it visits throughout the course of its decline. The projects current state is installation of the software that I am writing into the computer during gallery hours in an effort to also demystify the process of the transformation. One of the problems of our era is that we have too many black boxes or white boxes of technology and not enough knowledge as to how that technology actually works. The piano and its assistive technologies will serve as a repository for the past, a focal point for the present, and a marker for future intersections.
