Halsey Burgund: ROUND :: March 9 - July 27, 2008 :: Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Connecticut :: Exhibition Reception: March 9, 2008; 3 - 5 pm.

ROUND is an audio installation that will solicit spoken voice contributions from visitors and use them as part of a musical composition intended to be listened to while viewing the work on view in the galleries. The interactive audio experience will allow visitors to hear a diverse range of voices — including artists, curators, and visitors — sharing their perspectives about the exhibitions and to add their responses. The comments will be collected in a database of recordings and subsequently incorporated into the piece. Thus, there will be a continual loop of opinion and emotional response, all contained within a musical work. The flexible infrastructure developed and built for the installation will be the basis for future audio tours at the Museum.

From the Press Release:

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 will introduce … an innovative audio tour guide that operates on a similar premise. [...]

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 will enable 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 … The flexible infrastructure developed and built for the installation will become the foundation for pause. play, a program for future audio tours at the Museum. Nina Carlson, director of education comments, “Visitors look to museum audio guides for insightful and informed commentary to enhance their experience by facilitating connections to the art they encounter in the galleries. This revolutionary type of guide suits The Aldrich, first, because it encourages a two way dialogue, and second, because we are a non-collecting museum with frequently changing exhibitions.”

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.