Impossible Bridge
A collaboration with media artist Dylan Gauthier, this performance was part of the Chance Ecologies Newtown Creek, a day of events which was in turn part of Rebecca Solnit’s Nonstop Metropolis: The Remix. Impossible Bridge documents an eponymous performance at Plank Road, the former site of a bridge that once connected the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens over the Newtown Creek. The 45-minute-long performance functioned as a floating sound sculpture consisting of a wooden boat, a hand-built radio transmitter, two hydrophones, and sound exciters that turned the bridge’s former pilings into resonant loudspeakers. Dressed in protective hazmat suits and conveying their bodies and the hydrophones over the surface of and through the polluted waterway, the artists enact a temporary, underwater audio bridge to span Plank Road’s long-disused creek crossing, as a poetic rendering of infrastructure loss and a neglected chapter of the city’s industrial past.
Tags: Bennington College Artist, Brooklyn, Chance Ecologies, Dylan Gauthier, Edmund Mooney, Environmental Art, Gowanus, Newtown Creek, Nonstop Metropolis, Rebecca Solnit, SAIC Artist, Urban History, Video Art
