Skip to main navigation Skip to content

Soon/ Now/ Gone

Soon/ Now/ Gone engages with the Rail Park site’s history as a space for movement through a series of interactive installations and performances. Our point of departure is 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 will be 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 is 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 will be able to create their own scores to the moving images on the tunnel wall. Thematically-linked performance programs each night feature everything from time-traveling storytellers to processional puppets to audio-visual improvisations.

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.

Artists

Erik Ruin

Erik Ruin is a Michigan-raised, Philadelphia-based printmaker, shadow puppeteer, and paper-cut artist who has been lauded by The New York Times for his “spell-binding cut-paper animations.” His work oscillates between the poles of apocalyptic anxieties and utopian yearnings, with an emphasis on empathy, transcendence, and obsessive detail. He frequently collaborates with musicians, theater performers, other artists, and activist campaigns. He is a founding member of the international Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and co-author of the book Paths Toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (with Cindy Milstein, PM Press, 2012).

Rosie Langabeer

Rosie Langabeer is an award-winning composer, pianist, and band leader from Aotearoa New Zealand. With an output as eclectic as ranging from composing for string quartet, to ballet music, to free improvisation, to solo piano concerts and much much more, her wonderfully honest voice will make you want to cry and then sprinkle in some robot-bird-monsters. The New York Times has praised her surrealism and time-bending abilities, which she earned through collaborations with local heavyweights BalletX and Pig Iron Theatre Company, and her current projects include a suite of compositions for invented instruments by Neil Feather in combination with classical instrumentalists from Bowerbird’s Arcana Ensemble; and a new ballet score made in collaboration with Tara Middleton for BalletX’s 2019 fall season this December at The Wilma Theater.

Alert:

Close