Sound House
(everyone is working)
Sound House (everyone is working) is an intermedial durational performance, created in collaboration by John Eagle (sound), Janie Geiser (visual design, animation, puppets) Cassia Streb (sound, bricklaying) and an ensemble of designers and performers, including video designer Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh, lighting designer Chu-Hsuan Chang, and wall designer Vincent Richards. Sound House is an activated performance-installation centered on a series of tasks that shape the sound in the room.
Sound House centers on the routines of the men and women who work underground in America’s nuclear Minutemen Missile facilities, maintaining readiness at 450 nuclear missile silos. Located beneath innocuous isolated brick structures across the West, the Minutemen technicians memorize instructions and practice launch procedures, filling extensive idle time playing games, reading, and napping. Performers and puppets in Sound House are similarly occupied with practical work (practicing launch procedures, creating brick structures, and coding) as well as idle tasks. There is an inscrutable tension between these two realms of activity that moves us and is critical to our investigation.
The tasks in Sound House, based on changing sets of instructions, are enacted by an ensemble of ten artist/performers manipulating controllers, walls, wooden figures/puppets, and bricks. The 8 modular walls (3.5’ square) are embedded with microcomputers, sensors, and speakers that communicate wirelessly. Codes generated by performers and puppets are sent to the speakers, signaling instructions to performers arranging the walls, transforming physical and sonic space. A feedback loop between the walls and microphones placed inside the puppets tracks their movement, providing rich sonic material.
Sound House synthesizes old technologies (puppetry, bricklaying) and new ones (physically responsive audio systems, coding, live-mixed video), where all modes of operation are visible and networked in expansive ways, heightening interactivity among puppets, performers, sound and video. The task of building a brick structure forms a core measurement of time in Sound House, and recreates the entrance structure used by the Minutemen technicians to enter the underground launch facilities.
Viewers can move freely about the perimeters of the delineated performance space and experience the shifting sound and action; their presence and movement also affect the sound. The overall effect is one of focused activity, like a NASA control room. Performers follow a running time clock. Live-feed and live-mixed projection amplifies tasks and provides information. Meaning emerges through form, accumulation, and association. Each performance is site specific and responds to each unique site through different task protocols, physical spacing, sound, and duration. We imagine a range of iterations over the life of Sound House, with each particular iteration as its own premiere.
The first full iteration of Sound House (everyone is working) was presented at the Wende Museum on February 4, 2022 as part of the Music at the Wende series. (see an excerpt of this Wende Museum performance below). To view an excerpt from a performance of Sound House at the UC Irvine;s Experimental Media Performance Lab in June 2021, click HERE. (To view excerpts from earlier works-in-progress of Sound House at Automata, click HERE and HERE.)