HOUSTON, TX.- The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Whispering Bayou, an immersive multi-media installation that consists of a video triptych and a multi-channel soundscape composed of the sounds, voices, and images of Houstonians and their city. The project is a collaboration between Houston-based filmmaker, interactive multimedia producer, and community activist Carroll Parrott Blue; French composer and multimedia artist Jean-Baptiste Barrière; and New York-based composer and computer interactive artist George Lewis.
A team of artists and consultants (Thomas Goepfer, Damon Holzborn, Jason Moran), as well as a local advisory team with diverse backgrounds and strong Houston roots (Katy Atkiss, Krist Bender, Jamal Cyrus, David Dove, Johnny Hanson, Rachel Kagan, Rosalinda Mendez, Shelley Scott Wharton, Jason Woods), have gathered field recordings of the region, including video and audio interviews with residents past and present in order to create a diverse, multigenerational interactive conversation.
Whispering Bayou transforms these sonic and visual memories and histories of the city into a metaphorical, virtual bayou—an ever-evolving kaleidoscope of impressions that interact with visitor movements in space. The project has its roots in public art and the use of digital technology to engage audiences. The installation becomes a site for exchange, an environment that people can engage, and in which the environment responds back through shifts in the visual and sonic presentation, creating an interactive collaboration with the artists and the technology. From the moment people enter the space, the installation lets them know they are participating by showing them their own shadow. Through their shadow, viewers are presented with fragments of the collected images as well as a sound composition of disparate voices and narratives. Each visitor creates her or his own individual experience depending upon how she or he moves through the space. For some, the experience might be one of contemplation and meditation; for others, perhaps it's one of discovery where they find bits of themselves.
The work draws particular resonance from the Brays Bayou watershed, which connects nearly three-quarters of a million inhabitants who exemplify this global city’s rich diversity in which over 100 languages are spoken. “The bayou has all kinds of tracks, all kinds of life. That kind of fecund environment for the development of new forms of life really or the evolution of forms of life, I think underlie this project,” says collaborating artist George Lewis.
Whispering Bayou produces a vibrant emotional experience that stimulates memory and imagination.
The Artists
Carroll Parrott Blue is an award-winning filmmaker, author, and interactive multimedia producer. She is a former research professor at the University of Houston and executive director of The Dawn Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Blue uses community based media training, production, and distribution techniques for citizen engagement in neighborhood development. Blue has worked extensively in television. She is also an author who blends text, stills, graphics, and moving images in traditional and new media formats. Her interactive multimedia project The Dawn at My Back: Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing was a combination book, DVD-ROM, and website. In 2004, the American Library Association selected Dawn as one of the 30 best American Association of University Press publications, and it won the 2004 Sundance Online Film Festival Jury Award. Other multimedia works include a bayouvoices.org website and a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Our Town awardee. Blue is a San Diego State University professor emerita and a University of Central Florida retired professor.
Jean-Baptiste Barrière is a French composer who has also studied the history of art, philosophy, and mathematical logic. Parallel to his work as a composer, he served as a researcher at Ircam/Centre Georges Pompidou, developing computer programs to synthesize vocal singing. Between 1984 and 1997, Barrière served as director of Ircam’s Department of Musical Research. He later developed his own multimedia studio, Image Auditive, and has created numerous multimedia projects and collaborations. Recently, Barrière served as a visiting professor at Columbia University and as composer in residence at Columbia’s Computer Music Center. His Le Jardin des Songes /The Garden of Dreams, a musical and visual interactive installation, was presented as parallel installation projects at the Musée Gadagne in Lyon (as part of the Biennale Musiques en Scènes) and at Columbia’s Maison Française (2013-14). Barrière is the recipient of numerous awards including the Prix de la Musique Numérique of the Concours international de Musique Electroacoustique of Bourges (1983); the coveted Ars Electronica Interactive Art Prize (1998) for his soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s Flying Over Water; and the Grand Prix Multimédia Charles Cros for Prisma, the musical universe of Kaija Saariaho (2000).
George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Lewis has received a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s compositions are documented on more than 140 recordings, and have been performed by BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, and others. His widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s first Music in American Culture Award.
