Art Installations

Timothy Nohe: 142 Ways to Mark Time

142 Ways to Mark Time is an art installation that intermixes on-site audio recordings of the prison environment, and musical performances executed on the ruined artifacts of the Eastern State Penitentiary. In this site-specific work 142 environmental and performance recordings are played back in the solitary cells of Cellblock Ten, and intermixed in the common corridor of the cellblock.

The earliest prisoners at Eastern State Penitentiary were hooded as they were moved from cell to corridor, from place to place. Deprived of sight, they surely relied upon sound to make sense of their world. The hooded prisoner would apprehend his location and relationship to guards, fellow prisoners and the outside world through what he could hear... footsteps, keys, birds, crickets, a passing horse-drawn carriage echoing over massive stone walls. In listening, prisoners heard the daily rhythm of life in the prison. In his cell, the prisoner may have tapped out rhythms on the spare objects all around, or marked time by listening to the seasons as they slipped by, as soft rain gave way to sleet and snow, as geese winged overhead in free migratory flight. Time can be marked by such regular cadences¥ a heartbeat, a clock, footsteps. Time can become elastic and slow down (or speed up) with the sound of a watch ticking, snoring, a faucet dripping in the middle of the night, a rat scratching away inside a wall. All of these noises can be heard as profoundly musical.

In 142 Ways to Mark Time cadences were performed and recorded on rusting metal gates, wood benches, fallen plaster, broken glass, gates, locks, and so forth. The forces of weather ¥ dripping water, wind, and creaking windows were recorded to capture the environmental residue of time. Time was the singular element marked and internalized by every guard, family member, and prisoner over the course of 142 years at The Eastern State Penitentiary. Time, and the counting of cadences, is the structuring principle of this work. Each sonic environment and performance was also photographed, and the images were printed on orchestral score paper. The resulting visual music scores are presented as large bound folios on music stands positioned at the end of each cellblock corridor. Visitors are invited to link the sounds that they experience, and the environments and performances that produced them. By making that link, they are challenged to hear anew the sounds of freedom and incarceration.

Timothy Nohe is an artist and educator engaging traditional and electronic media in public life and public places. His recent work has been realized in site-specific sound and video installations, scores for dance, Internet publications, sculpture, and hypertext poetry. He has exhibited and performed his work in venues ranging from The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; ISEA, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz; the Danish Institute of Electro-Acoustic Music, ¥rhus, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Two Maryland State Arts Council awards have supported his work in the area of New Genre. He serves the public performance art group Fluid Movement as a board member and composer, and is a member of the International Corporation of Lost Structures, a Sydney-based creative collective. Nohe is currently an Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

This installation was funded in part by an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Other works by Timothy Nohe may be found at: http://research.umbc.edu/~nohe/GAG/