Client: Commissioned by the Rotary Club of Baton Rouge as a Centennial gift for the City of Baton Rouge, LA.

Location: Baton Rouge, LA, United States

Completion date: 2020

Artwork budget: $340,000

Project Team

Concept, Design, Part Fabrication

Po Shu Wang

Living Lenses Artist Team

Voice Research and Collection

Jillian Crocker

Programming and Electronics

Soren Lyngso Knudsen

Vectral

Project Manager

Beau Olinde

Artwork Site Design

Ramon (Sipper) Post

Post Architecture Inc.

Site Host Offering and Permitting

David Rhorer

DDD Office

Structural Foundation

Leo Panian

Tipping Structural Ltd

USGS

Mark Baumann

Local Water Science Office

Site Construction and Permits

Army Corps of Engineers

US Army Corps of Engineers

Installation

Mike Moran

Turner Industries Group

Site Construction

Kyle Flettrich

Bro Brothers Concrete Works

Electrical

Frank Brian

SAIA Electrics, Ltd

Wireless Network

Aaron Glazer

Verma System Inc.

Sculpture Assembly, Finish Polish

John

Architectural Glass & Metal, Inc.

Overview

An Artwork created for the Mississippi River to sing to us. Communities who had lived and are living within the 31 States of the Mississippi River basin that spans from East of the Rockies to West of the Appalachian are singing to us through our sculpture, installed at the new plaza that jutted our beyond levee, at downtown Baton Rouge LA.
Basically, recorded singing voices’ fragments from the river basin since 1889 on , are selected for our voice bank, where embedded river sensors allow the flow behavior of the Mississippi River to evolve the on-going voice jam from moment to moment, across time, genres, and social barriers, all together in harmony, by way of our choice of songs fragments only in the Keys of C and G.
An invitation plaque on-site is inviting us all to chime in a harmony or two with the river .

Goals

The goal of this artwork is to honor the Mississippi River with its peoples by tangibly tying the voices of the past and present into the future in harmony, voices that have and will keep gurgling and rushing down from the entire River basin into a mile wide flow before passing through Baton Rouge.

Process

Our first collaborator is of course the Mississippi River itself, and with USGS's local Water Science Office help, we installed river sensors to setup a mechanism to maintain an on-going collaboration with the river and the visitors.
Besides Tipping Engineer, Vector Software and Electronics Design collaborations, we unexpectedly received the collaboration from the Army Corp of Engineers and have a platform plaza built out beyond the levee crown, and appropriately situated our artwork right on top of the River, to which Post Architects of Baton Rouge had freely collaborated on the design of our new plaza.
And most of all, the artwork design make sure that the on-going collaboration from visitors voice inputs will guarantee that the artwork will be living sculpture that keep on expressing the liveliness of the River and the People into the future.

Additional Information

This project was completed in December 2019, right before the 2020 lock down year, during which emails from random visitors have already been expressing their appreciations of this unique destination.