I was lucky enough to visit artist Craig Colorusso’s installation piece Sun Boxes today. I’ve blogged it before, with the video of a windy test run that was making the rounds, but with slightly better conditions (and my new iPhone) I put together a minute of new video. Nothing can really match the spatial feeling of walking through the speakers, trying to identify and follow the notes, but for those of us who sat in front of the field, trying to not get baked by the sun, this is pretty close! Apologies for the trembly camera work—apparently I need to practice that with the new phone.

I got a chance to talk with Craig about the installation. First, some practical details: each box (there are 20, but plans for 100 in the future) plays a single note, stored as a sample on a chip (they’re recordings of him playing guitar, although they sound like they could be synthesized tones), and the sample lengths are varied so that patterns emerge and repeat rarely, Discreet Music-style. Craig made a great point in line with what Eno has said about Discreet Music: faint music makes you listen, and you begin to notice the sounds that are not part of the music. Although not terribly quiet (in a good way—it really created a sense of aural exterior space), I found that Sun Boxes made me notice the other sounds of the outdoors and try to incorporate them into the “music”—birdsong, mowers, golfers (we were next to a golf course). The whole thing is a B flat 6 chord, separated out spatially, and it’s the kind of thing you wish you could hear faintly all the time.

The economy of parts in the installation is very pleasant: each box is self-contained, with a solar panel on top and no way to store power, they just stop when the sun goes away. I will say that I kind of wish the tones were synthesized in each box; they didn’t need to be recordings, and there is something elegant about the idea of solar-powered oscillators producing tones, as if the photons blow through the circuit, stopping only with nightfall or a passing cloud.

[and then, to complete my “boxes of the north shore tour,” we had lunch at the clam box. also recommended.]