Sonic Dish

[Quick program note here, it occurred to me that a steady diet of nothing but HCRH Milepost posts might be getting a little, I dunno, monotonous? And maybe I ought take do a quick break from that and finish a few Draft posts that look ready to go seek their fortune on the wild interwebs. So maybe we'll do some public art posts first, then maybe a waterfall hike or two before we pick back up with the milepost nerditude.]

Next up we're having a peek at Sonic Dish, the parabolic disco-tastic shiny thing under the Tilikum Crossing Bridge, by artists Anna Valentina Murch and Doug Hollis. It's sort of embedded into the bridge, and TriMet's Orange Line public art guide describes it as "Concave discs in bridge abutment walls amplify sound and reflect the same light program as on the bridge above.". The light program mentioned there is Tilikum Light, the ever-changing colors of the bridge at night, as pre-programmed by the same artists as Sonic Dish. The art guide describes Tilikum Light as "Programmable lighting on cable stays and piers changes color and motion depending on the natural conditions of the Willamette River." I haven't checked under the bridge at night to see whether the sonic dish reflects the bridge lights in an interesting way, but I kind of doubt it does much of that, seeing as the illuminated part is directly above the dish but with the whole deck of the bridge in the way. Pretty sure you'd need lights under the bridge aimed at the dish for that to happen. I dunno, maybe it was originally supposed to have lights but lost them to budget cuts and someone forgot to update the blurb. I know that happens in the software business all the time, but maybe artists are more meticulous about documentation than we are. Honestly that wouldn't really surprise me.

I did an ad-hoc test on a sunny summer day, in the late afternoon so it was receiving direct sunlight, and it did seem to concentrate light and heat in an area in front of the dish, but not all focused to a single point, as evidenced by my not catching on fire during the experiment. The dish is made of a bunch of little flat metallic tiles with a sort of semi-matte finish, and I'm not sure how to determine whether they're in even a very rough parabola shape, so this may be the best it's capable of. I mean, if there were any possible conditions under which it could be Portland's answer to the Vdara Death Ray -- rudely igniting passing cyclists and geese, and detonating unwary speedboats out on the river -- I think we would have heard about it by now. Still, when it comes to the micro-genre of under-bridge acoustic art, I think this comes out ahead of Echo Gate under the Morrison Bridge, which sort of references the fact that it's quite noisy under there, but doesn't really try to do anything with all that noise.

The brand-spanking-new bridge featured in a 2015 Pedalpalooza group bike ride event, a 'Grease' sing-along bike ride. Which is one of those inexplicable things that made perfect sense back in the innocent pre-pandemic, pre-Trump days of Peak Portlandia, back when living here was nothing but golden carefree days of swimming and frolicing in the sparkly pure Willamette River for hours, followed by free shows by incredibly obscure local bands that nobody on Earth has ever heard of, and then $1 tacos from the hot new 24/7 Greenlandic-Zimbabwean fusion cart, paired with PBR tallboys for 10 cents each. Of course the art had already been vandalized at least once before the bridge even opened, but the general consensus at the time was that being annoyed by graffitti was the mark of an unsophisticated normie, and eventually the, ah, guerrilla street artists behind it would most likely graduate to making whimsical whatzits for the next MAX line, or at least to making semi-edgy art gallery stuff for the First Thursday circuit.

Back in 2011 TriMet canceled another sonic art proposal, which would've played a Simon and Garfunkel song when cyclists rode over the bridge, thanks to finely tuned grooves that would have been imprinted on the path. You wouldn't think this would be expensive, and the article doesn't explain why it would have been so expensive, but from what little I know of the music industry I'm guessing the studio lawyers saw a high-profile licensing deal and got so greedy they tanked the whole proposal (and naturally Paul and Art would not have seen a penny of any money that changed hands). Maybe a bit more flexibility on which song and whose song to use would have helped make this happen. I have to imagine a lot of local musicians would've loved to have their song imprinted on the new bridge, or even write something new just for the bridge, exploring what it's really capable of as a musical instrument. And if that was just too indie for TriMet management, I actually had the perfect idea in mind, if only the agency's transit art folks had thought to call me for advice. The key thing is to tell the pointy-haired bosses you just finagled a great music deal for the bridge, but absolutely do not let anyone try it out before the bridge opens and all the local dignitaries have a big awkward ceremonial bike ride over it, and only then do they realize they just funded the world's most elaborate cover of a randomly selected 1980s pop song from the UK. You can go ahead and click that perfectly innocent link right there in the previous sentence. It's fine, probably.