The “bean” is actually a seed from a tree found in certain mountainous regions in Mexico. The seed contain the larva of the jumping bean moth. In the spring, these moths lay their eggs on the seed, which then burrow their way inside and turn into larvae. The larvae feed on the soft tender heart of the bean and remain protected inside during the course of their development into moths. The following spring, the moths hatch, and the cycle repeats itself.

The beans actually “jump” as a survival measure. The heat, which causes them to dry out, is their enemy. Thus, when the bean gets into the sun or onto a hot surface, the larva snaps its body in an effort to roll to a cooler place.

At the Pulitzer, the sound they make as they reverberate on the table is miked and amplified through speakers in the floor of the Mezzanine, giving the visitor the experience of being truly immersed in the beans. At times, this sound is also emitted throughout the main speaker system in the building. All in all, the beans provide a living, moving that literally animates the space.

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Visitors at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts give their impressions at the opening reception for stylus: a project by ann hamilton.

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Artist Ann Hamilton, Composer Shahrokh Yadegari and the opera singer Elizabeth Zharoff create a recording for the installation of stylus.

To add a “sense of  humanity as well as mystery,” Shahrokh Yadegari explained last week, he and Ann Hamilton chose to incorporate a human voice into stylus’s primary sound composition. They talked with the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and were introduced to the singer Elizabeth Zharoff. The three met at Jupiter Studios, a recording studio in downtown St. Louis, where Zharoff sang as Yadegari improvised using her voice and a computer music instrument he invented. The instrument is called “Lila,” a word that literally means “play” in Hinduism but implies creative freedom within a set of boundaries. Zharoff and Yadegari’s collaboration as well as Ann Hamilton’s installation seem to exemplify that concept quite nicely.

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Shahrokh Yadegari, Composer/Sound Designer, and his assistant Toby Algya program player pianos for Ann Hamilton’s stylus. Yadegari describes how the instruments will be used during the exhibition.

When we think of the word “stylus,” what comes to mind nowadays is a touch pen used on a palm computer. The upcoming exhibition’s namesake has many denotations, though, such as a pillar or a tool used to engrave wax. As Matthias Waschek broached in the last “From the Director,” the meanings of “stylus” overlap and fundamentally relate to communication. My favorite image of a stylus is a record player’s needle, which magically emits music from a slab of vinyl. At Friday’s opening, you’ll be able to experience a similarly wonderful transmission of sound.

Shahrokh Yadegari explained last week that voice will be used in a few ways for the installation, including turning player pianos in the Cube and Lower galleries into “talking pianos.” When visitors in the galleries speak into an artfully placed microphone, a piano will play the voice with its keys and talk to whoever is near them. We don’t have video of that yet, so you’ll need to hear it for yourself and be amazed this weekend.

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Art preparators mount bell speakers on top of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. Shahrokh Yadegari describes what sounds will be called out to the neighborhood.

If you’ve driven by the Pulitzer in last couple of weeks, you’ll notice that the neon sign is gone, and there are now five bell speakers on the roof facing Washington Boulevard. They are, of course, for the upcoming stylus, an exhibition that focuses on the notion of calling, and they’ll soon be calling to St. Louis.

The speakers in fact originally came from church bell towers, so this won’t be the first time they’ve been used to beckon a community. However, this time the community will have a chance to contribute to the sound, which Shahrokh Yadegari, a composer and sound designer working with Ann Hamilton, explained in an interview last week.

“It’s kind of the sound of the community that will be used as a gesture of calling to others,” said Yadegari. Anyone, anywhere will be able to call an account the Pulitzer is setting up and leave a message, which may then be funneled off the Pulitzer rooftop. These recordings will also be played inside the building.

“The sound system is really complex,” Shane, our Chief of Installations, explained about stylus. The audio maze so far includes light sensors, speakers throughout the building’s ventilation system and two player pianos. Hamilton worked with Yadegari to a create a system that, according to Shane, is “integrated so much into the architecture that it turns the building into some kind of giant instrument.”

Before installation began, Ann Hamilton’s studio sent Colin’s sketches to Shane Simmons, our Chief of Installations, who created a mock-up of the cubbies using foam core. He placed it in front of the window to the Water Court to see how it affected the architecture and light patterns of the Pulitzer. Here was the scene at 5pm:

Ann Hamilton’s studio designed the cubbies as a place to put the paper hands but also to be art objects in themselves, which interact with the Ando building in a harmonious way. The Pulitzer commissioned a cabinet shop in St. Louis to build modular units, which are five cubbies high and fit together to make a 6-foot-tall, 172-foot-wide structure.

As a final touch, Craig, a painter at the Pulitzer, painted the cubbies in eggshell white.

As you’ve seen on the blog over the past few days, we’re in the midst of installing stylus, a project by the artist Ann Hamilton.  But what is this exhibition all about?

If you could sum it up in one word (which you really can’t) “experience” would be high on the list.  “Immersive,”  and “interactive” would work too. Ann’s installation is structured around live acoustic elements, and like many of her installations, weaves together a range of media to produce an environment that engages your senses as you move through it.  Her work responds to the architectural presence and social history of the sites she works within, and she will be interacting with the Ando building in very distinctive ways, transforming each gallery into an engrossing audio and visual environment.  Without giving all of it away, here are a few of the elements you’ll discover in the installation:

A central focus is sound, which Ann has closely worked on with sound designer and composer Shahrokh Yadegari.  Visitors will be able to interact with the sound in a variety of ways – from using a stylus and a touch pad to “sign-in,” to a steel table in the Main Gallery with a rolling tray and a microphone.   Input from these elements will feed into either the speakers on the roof of the Pulitzer building or two player pianos situated in the Cube and Lower Galleries, which will then transmit the sounds.  There will also be record players throughout the exhibition, five rolling platform ladders with rotating projectors, jumping beans, taxidermy birds, a wall of cast paper hands that visitors can wear, concordance texts produced from the daily newspaper…. as you can see, there are many elements that will contribute to your overall experience.  The hope for these materials is to engage a relationship between the individual and the group, a single voice and a chorus, a silent book and a spoken reading, and finally, between a solitary listening and a collective hearing.

Bob McCabe, Morning Host for KWMU, reads during A Marathon Metamorphoses.

“…how does one communicate the experience of an ephemeral two day reading in our exhibition space?” our director, Matthias Waschek asked today in his very first blog post for the Pulitzer. He is, of course, reflecting on last year’s marathon reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which has so far been the only event of its kind in our building.

To capture the experience, a local videographer video taped the almost twenty hours of reading in the Lower Gallery. He then edited the footage down to eight minutes, which includes a shot of each of the seventy-four readers. You can now watch the video and read Matthias’ reflections on it on our A Marathon Metamorphoses blog.

Courtney Henson, our Visitor Services Manager, is an artist and particularly admires the work of Ann Hamilton, so last week, I  interviewed her via g-chat on what she’s looking forward to about stylus. She = pulitzerarts.

4:04 PM me: So how do you feel about the Ann Hamilton exhibition coming up?

pulitzerarts: pause-personally or as the visitor services manager or the combo?

me: Both.

4:05 PM pulitzerarts: Ok. 4:09 PM Well I have been interested in Ann’s work for quite a while. In graduate school, I began to appreciate the performative aspects of her work more. I also liked the ways that she was integrating a space fully in her installations. It is exciting to get an opportunity to see her approach the Ando building with her methods for involving all the senses. It will be a new experience for us as an institution as we have not worked inside the building with a living artist.

4:10 PM me: What will you and the gallery assistants do to get ready for the opening?

pulitzerarts: That is a great question. We may just have to be as prepared as possible for whatever comes up. Ann Hamilton is extremely process driven. I suspect that the best that I and the gallery assistants can do is read up on her other works and try to get a sense for where things might go. We may not really get a full taste until the exhibition is fully installed. There is a possibility that she may ask the gallery assistants to participate in interactive parts of the exhibition.

me: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

4:22 PM pulitzerarts: I feel like the exhibition is hard to write about, because Ann is creating a sensory experience, which is hard to describe. Seeing it, hearing it, being in it will be very important to understanding it. The Pulitzer staff is prepared to go along for the ride and happy to translate, whether information to the guests or to make our building “play” its part. Sound is a major way the Pulitzer building will be a participant in stylus.

Since the end of May, a group of graduates from Washington University’s Sam Fox School have been crafting oodles of paper hands to be in stylus. Lindsay Deifik, an organizer for this venture, answered some questions about the process and e-mailed me some photos from the studio.

What is your role for the installation of Ann Hamilton’s stylus?

I am the Studio Assistant Coordinator for the paper hand production here at Washington University. My responsibilities include overseeing the working schedules of our assistants, cataloguing the hands, directing various aspects of our production and of course making plenty of hands myself. I’m really grateful to have fallen into a job that requires me to be making and producing right after graduating with a BFA. I am also serving as a nexus of communication between Ann, her studio in Ohio, the Pulitzer and our base here at the university. It’s been really exciting to see all of the components and dispersed activity that goes into the production of a show of this magnitude here in Saint Louis.

When did you start working on the project?

Our team got to work on May 24th, the week following graduation. All of us have just graduated from either the Undergraduate or Masters programs at Washington University. We have been applying the intense momentum of studio life towards this project, and, three weeks in, we have over 225 pairs of hands.

What exactly goes into the process of making the hands?

The process turned out to be more complex than we had anticipated. Not only are we forming the hands, but we have also been making much of the paper we have been using. I have experience with making western-style, cotton based paper from my undergrad, but this project has allowed all of us to learn how to make a type of abaca fiber paper. This is much thinner and more translucent than traditional paper. After the pulp is made, it is poured onto a screen in a water bath. Sheets are then pulled and allowed to dry in the sun. It’s pretty magical to see the corners of the finished paper, pulling off the screens in the wind.

We are using two methods to then form the hands. Volunteers sculpted many clay hands when Ann was here in the spring. Paper is then applied to the hands, allowed to dry and then cut off of these forms. We also have plaster molds of these forms, where we press paper into them and then pull them out once they have dried. Both of these methods require us to then mend the hands, a stage in the process where much of their individual characters arise.

Did Ann give you specific guidelines on how the hands should look?

Ann met with some of our team before we began, and gave us some parameters. Our continuing communications and the photographs we have been sending back and forth have contributed to changes in our approach. Ann has been very adamant about each hand having it’s own unique character, allowing the material to dictate the end result.

Who else is involved in the project?

Our team has grown in this short period of time. Chloe Bethany, Yetunde Ogunfidodo, both recent graduates of the BFA sculpture program, as well as Carlie Trosclair and Nick Hutchings from the MFA program have been working from the start. Our team now also includes Ella Brandon, Mamie Korpela, and Megan Bean.

How many hands will you be creating?

We are shooting for 603 pairs at the very least. We have been filling up our workspace with what we have made so far, and they’re taking over our studio! It is my understanding that even more will be made after we reach this initial goal.

What are your feelings about the experience so far?

Chloe and I had taken part in the Saint Louis Art Revolution workshop with Ann and her husband Michael last summer. To a large extent, these two weeks functioned as a platform of research and inquiry into the city for Ann and the rest of our group. I found applying these methods to one’s artistic practice illuminating, and in turn I’m really excited to see how that experience will inform stylus.

The element of collaboration has also been important to me. It has transformed the studio from being strictly the focus of personal pursuit into something much different.