WINDCHIME.WORLD
various artists
World Wide Wind Chime Festival
windchime.world
We have a tendency to think of earth as a closed system. it is not. we do not live in a sealed spacecraft, isolated from the environment in a convenient bubble of air. we travel rapidly through space and time with our windows open, constantly exposed to the complex ecology of the galaxy and all it contains. we are windblown. and, while one of the consequences of this openness may be bouts of influenza, another could be the very existence of life itself.
— Lyall Watson, Heaven's Breath: A Natural history of the Wind (1984)
The World Wide Wind Chime Festival is a virtual public art exhibition curated by CHORUS in collaboration with Laurel Schwulst. It was supported in part by Princeton University. For the virtual festival, we sent web cameras to 9 artists around the world. Each artist live-streamed their wind chime, which was linked to a portal on the site. The streams were live from May 23 – July 31, 2022, and are now memorialized in still photos or videos.
The World Wide Wind Chime Festival was born out of our interest in wind as a connective tissue, and the wind chime as an object that makes us acutely aware of our interdependence. In creating this virtual public artwork, we wondered: Is it possible for an artwork to reshape the layer of fear and bias we have added over the last two pandemic years onto the idea of being interconnected? How can we embrace co-presence and the forces of nature that move between us and bind us in a way that is celebratory, creative, or poetic?
Some people have said the site itself is like an instrument of not only chimes but live ambient sounds around the world: the wind in California paired with the rain in Australia accompanied by the early morning chickens in Italy. We hope visitors can experience this ambient, elemental interconnectedness that moves across continents!
Artists of the virtual wind chime exhibition include Anna Reutinger (Netherlands/ Oakland, CA), Anna Sew Hoy + Giles Miller + family (Los Angeles, CA), Lola Orge Benech (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Lucia Leuci (Milan/ Torre Santa Susanna, Italy), Mark Beasley (San Pedro, CA), Oliver Hull (Melbourne, Australia), Weiyi Li (Beijing, China), Willa Smart(Davis, CA), Hiroki Yamasaki (Okazaki, Japan), Monica Hofstadter + family (Brooklyn, NY), and Raque Ford (NYC/ Jefferson, NY).
We are thankful to individual donors and Princeton University for their generous support.
Individual donors adopted a level of the Beaufort wind scale, used by sailors and first devised in 1805 by the English naval commander Francis Beaufort. The scale begins at 0, which is a wind speed too slow to move a ship at all, and ends at number 12, which indicates a wind speed too high for the ship to carry any canvas.
Sponsor ............................ Force & Classification
Hyperlink.academy ........... 0 - Calm
John Palmer ....................... 1 - light air
Paragonday Systems ........ 2 - light breeze
Mattie Goedecke ……....….. 3 - gentle breeze
harm van den dorpel ........ 4 - moderate breeze
omar rizwan …….….…....….. 5 - fresh breeze
callil capuozzo …….….…..... 6 - strong breeze
linked by air …...….…….……. 7 - near gale
david allin reese …………..... 8 - gale
mattie goedecke ….….…..... 9 - strong gale
austin wade smith ….……... 10 - storm
dragan espenschied …....... 11 - violent storm
municipal geology ….…....… 12 - hurricane