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To celebrate the release of their second location-aware album this year, the D.C. duo Bluebrain is inviting friends to come get site-specific with them.
On Sat., Oct. 15, Bluebrain is heading up a party bus to Manhattan to lead a listening expedition in Central Park—the site of the band’s new app-album, Listen to the Light. They’ve booked a party bus, found some sponsors (Sweetgreen and DC Brau), and now they’re looking for warm bodies to fill their seats.
For $40, fans can register through an Eventbrite page to hop on a bus with the band and head to New York. That covers travel to and fro and libations along the way, but not lodging. In addition to taking in Central Park through a smart-phone app, the tickets include a group outing to “You Are Here”, a group exhibit featuring D.C. artists, and an after-party at Lit Lounge.
The expedition costs no more than a normal bus ticket there and back, though Bluebrain is promising better seatmates. The group gave first dibs to a select group of D.C. artists, musicians, tech nerds, and social-media types. According to Patrick Wixted, who’s helping to organize the thing, the bus is about half full now.
It’s too bad this trip couldn’t come just slightly later in the month. Another D.C. artist, Ryan Hackett—the winner of the 2010 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize—will be exhibiting a show at Central Park’s Arsenal Gallery, starting Oct. 26. Check out Hackett’s description of his exhibit, “Natural Synthetics”:
Intrigued by a common desire to find solace in feigned natural environments, Hackett manipulates the forms, colors, and sounds of the natural world into highly immersive experiences. He “samples” auditory and visual elements, repeating and manipulating the sound or image to create a hybrid composition, much like an electronic musician. In Hackett’s works, the fluttering wings of a Monarch butterfly build into hypnotic ambient music, just as layered paintings diffuse photographs of animals and machines, questioning the dichotomy of artifice and nature.
If you’re a D.C. artist and you’re not transforming Central Park with interactive electronic media, what are you even doing?