Spectacle Island was recently transformed into a publicly accessible landfill park after serving the city of Boston as a dump for nearly a century. The island has long been used for recreation, recycling and waste disposal, having been home to horse rendering and grease extraction plants, casinos, hotels and the families who worked in these industries. 20th century waste and recycling industries eventually reduced the island to a toxic state such that it was closed in the late 1950s. Recently capped with tons of excavation material from Boston's Big Dig Tunnel Project, the island is now a public landfill park that includes over 28,000 plantings embedded in a top layer of scientifically formulated loam.
Core Sample seeks to pierce the picturesque surface that conceals Spectacle Island's complex past, present and future, exposing it through layers of sound. Visitors to the island borrow small computer / headphone units equipped with GPS and wander the island to hear sounds inspired by the island's complex material and cultural history. Sounds play back automatically as the GPS senses the visitor's movement in the landscape. Over 250 sounds are spatially and thematically organized according to elevation, evoking a metaphoric core sample. Open cell headphones allow blurring to occur between actual and pre-recorded ambient sound. Abstract sounds and musical compositions are sparsely punctuated with occasional passages of spoken word, dissolving boundaries between surface and core, natural and artificial, industrial and organic, past, present and future. Spoken word passages include interviews with current and former island residents and laborers, landfill technology experts, and botanists who study disturbed landscapes and ecosystems.
Spectacle Island - Core Sample map
