Soon/ Now/ Gone

SOON/ NOW/ GONE (2019) was a series of interactive installations and performances created by Rosie Langabeer and myself, commissioned by the City of Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, Friends of the Rail Park and the American Composer's Forum, and funded by the William Penn Foundation. We engaged with the Rail Park site’s history as a space for movement through a series of interactive installations and performances. Our point of departure was the Victorian era, where technologies such as the railroad and photography/cinema began to be used as a way to capture, collapse, and re-deploy time. In various tunnels and underpasses beneath the Viaduct section of the Rail Park, audiences were invited to activate zoopraxiscopes—a pre-cinema device developed by Eadweard Muybridge in 1879—which will project hand-drawn images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion. Each zoopraxiscope was fitted with a music device that visitors can use to activate an original soundtrack composed for the installation. By turning on and off different strains of the music and triggering sound effects, they were able to create their own scores to the moving images on the tunnel wall. Thematically-linked performance programs each night featured everything from time-traveling storytellers to processional puppets to audio-visual improvisations.

​

Performers included HPrizm, Erik Ruin's Ominous Cloud Ensemble, Asimina Chremos, Hua Hua Zhang, Mary McCool and Carolyn Gennari with Jenna Horton.

​

Zoopraxiscope soundtrack features musical contributions from: Kate Porter, Neil Feather, Joshua Machiz, Russell Kotcher, Keir Neuringer, Shelly Purdy, Tom Goldstein, and Will Redman. Engineer of Sound Playback and Controllers: Jeff Carey. Zoopraxiscope Fabrication: Tim Belknap.