Core Sample is a GPS-based interactive sound walk and corresponding sound sculpture that evokes the material and cultural histories contained in and suggested by the landscape of Spectacle Island. The piece engages the extended landscape of Boston Harbor as bounded by the new Boston Institute of Contemporary Art building on the downtown waterfront, and Spectacle Island, a former dump and reclaimed landfill park visible just off the coast. The two sites function dialogically, questioning what is seen versus what is heard, what is experienced versus what is represented artifactually.

20th century waste and recycling industries had reduced Spectacle Island to a toxic state such that it was closed in the late 1950s. Recently capped with tons of excavation material from Boston's Big Dig Tunnel Project, the island is now a public landfill park.

Visitors to the island borrow small computer / headphone units equipped with GPS and wander the island to hear sounds inspired by the island's complex material and cultural history. Sounds play back automatically as the GPS senses the visitor's movement in the landscape. Over 250 sounds are spatially and thematically organized according to elevation, evoking a metaphoric core sample. Open-cell headphones allow blurring to occur between actual and prerecorded ambient sound. Abstract sounds and musical compositions are sparsely punctuated with occasional passages of spoken word, dissolving boundaries between surface and core, natural and artificial, industrial and organic, past, present and future.

Visitors to the Founders Gallery at the Boston ICA encounter a ninety-nine foot sound sculpture that first appears as a railing installed along the length of the gallery overlooking the harbor. The sculpture, embedded with tactile drivers throughout, functions as a giant speaker. Sounds from the island installation quietly emanate from within the form at intervals corresponding to the depths of the metaphoric core sample. The sculpture invites an absent-minded touch as viewers lean on the railing to take in the panoramic view. The soundscape is so subtle that it may even be mistaken at times for ambient outdoor sound permeating the glass façade.

Sound design: Peter Segerstrom & Ean White
Sculpture: Teri Rueb with Michelle Fornabai
Fabrication: Charles Mathis

Commissioned by the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art as part of the exhibition &8220;Art on the Harbor Islands&8221;, June 23 &8211; October 7, 2007