Roulette presents: THE PUBLIC SOUNDS - A Festival of Sound Art in Public Space, Curated by Jessica Feldman. Free!

Kabir Carter - Aug. 11 & 12, 18 & 19 (details to come); Jessica Feldman - Aug. 11 & 12, 18 & 19, at the intersection of Frankfort & Gold Streets; Kaffe Matthews – Aug. 15 –19 from 11:30am to 3pm each day, at the World Financial Center Plaza; Leslie Ross – Randomly will ride through the streets of lower Manhattan during the Festival; Stephen Vitiello – Aug. 18th, 8pm at the Would Financial Center Plaza or Winter Garden.

For two weeks this August, Roulette will present THE PUBLIC SOUNDS Festival: a group show of interrelated, public sound pieces throughout downtown Manhattan. The festival includes new pieces by Kaffe Matthews, Kabir Cater, Jessica Feldman, Leslie Ross and Stephen Vitiello with Molly Berg, all artists whose work is concerned with site-specificity, social issues and the engagement of the public. The festival seeks to re-imagine the way that our experience of the physical, political and historical presence of sound is affected by its context, and to achieve a new understanding of the sites and the sounds that can occur in, relate to, travel through and transform these contexts.

The works address the quality of sound as a medium of public art: it carries, it moves through space and time; unlike plastic objects, sound cannot be bound by walls. Even when we leave the origin of a sound, we carry with us the memory of it in our bodies. In this way, sound wants to transcend privatization. It exists in the air and water of the public city spaces surrounding us, waiting to be activated, carried, transmitted and remembered. It is a most salient feature of our social space. The works all recognize this essentially uncontainable quality of sound and seek to use sound to suggest a new means of interacting with and realizing their environment.