Walked down to Union Square today after escaping from work, to visit the paper stores and look for stuff for Lizard's book, and ran into a treat. It's been raining all day but wasn't as I walked through Madison Square Park. The leaves are coming out in lacy green and the trees are blooming, and everything looks so much brighter against the dark, wet trunks. This is why I love rainy days so much. The colors are more intense and the contrast more vivid. By the time I got done wandering in and out of Restoration Hardware, Paper Access, Print Icon, and Ennju, it had started to rain again and was about 6 pm. I bypassed my habitual entrance at 16th street in the middle of the greenmarket just because I decided I wanted to be aboveground fora while yet. So I walked up to the gazebo entrance near 14th Street and on the way ran into the sound installation, Sonic Forest by Christopher Janney of 10 metal pillars about 4 feet high and 8 inches around, encasing an occasionally flashing blue light and speakers. At random intervals each pillar flashes and then plays either chimes or gongs or birdsong. They're arranged in an allée and people kept walking up to the pillars and tapping them. It was hard to tell whether that activated them, but apparently they're motion sensitive too:
People “play” the installation by passing among slender aluminum columns (containing audio speakers, lights and photo-electric sensors) triggering an ever-changing “score” of melodic tones, environmental sounds and spoken texts and light effects. The installation will also randomly trigger itself in specific patterns, as if “ghosts” were passing invisibly through the forest.
In sunlight, I suspect it might be a bit hokey, but in the grey rain it was lovely, though it doesn't quite rank up there with the installation in Madison Square Park a couple of summers ago that was nothing but a little gingko tree, a rough wooden bench, a lichen-encrusted boulder and an invisible snowmaker that left big drifts in the 90 degree weather. That was less artlike than artful, but it appealed to the magical realist in me. I'm sure it'll find its way into a story somewhere. The soundscape installation was just a pleasant diversion: charming but not magical.
Still, this is what I love about living here: running into pleasant surprises like this, the serendipity of the city. Friday, after I was on my way home from hanging out with Marcia at the two book exhibits at NYPL, and ran into Merry, who dragged me off to the Annie Liebowitz opening around the corner. The odds of us running into each other that far from work and from anything else in common to us (we ran into each other at 56th & Madison; we work at Park & 29th) are pretty astronomical, but there we were. And 45 minutes later, I ran into another friend from work who lives in Queens at the Pottery Barn on 59th, on my way to the 59th & Lex station. That's strangely magical too.