Halsey Burgund: ROUND :: until July 27, 2008 :: The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT :: 203-438-4519

In a culture where technology enables source information to be collected and maintained by means of collaboration—such as public drives in the workplace and wikis on the Internet—The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present Halsey Burgund: ROUND, an exhibition that introduces an innovative audio tour guide that operates on a similar premise. The exhibition will close on July 27, 2008.

ROUND is an audio installation that solicits spoken voice contributions from visitors and uses them as part of a musical composition intended to be listened to while viewing the work in the galleries. The interactive audio experience allows visitors to hear a diverse range of voices—including artists, curators, and visitors—sharing their perspectives about the exhibitions, and to add their responses to the mix. Burgund’s installation is supported in part, by a grant from LEF Foundation.

The name of the exhibition alludes to both a musical round—a song in which two or more voices sing exactly the same melody but in an offset fashion—and the age-old Arthurian legend about the Knights of Camelot who sat at a round table, affording no one person a privileged position. Halsey Burgund explains, “Equality of opinion and the opportunity for two-way dialogue are core ideas of this project.”

ROUND allows visitors to experience other Aldrich exhibitions—specifically Charlotte Schulz: An Insufficiency in Our Screens and Painting the Glass House: Artists Revisit Modern Architecture—in a new way. The hand-held tablet computers will provide patrons the opportunity to select criteria for the types of voices they would like to hear while looking at the art—female curators, male artists, or children, for instance. Burgund says, “The comments will be collected in a database of recordings and subsequently incorporated into the piece in real-time using various computer algorithms and custom software. Thus, there will be a continual loop of opinion and emotional response, all contained within a musical work.”

You can hear a selection from the work here: http://www.aldrichart.org/exhibitions/burgund.php

Halsey Burgund is a musician and sound artist who lives and works outside Boston. Both his installations and musical performances make extensive use of spoken human voice recordings as musical elements, alongside traditional and electronic instruments. He collects these voices from otherwise uninvolved individuals whom he records in various locations, from museums to street corners to rock clubs. Halsey’s band, Aesthetic Evidence, performs music publicly, often including interactive performances in which he records audience members’ voices and uses those recordings improvisationally within songs.