detailed image of industrial needle felt underlayment, with view of maroon coating and matted, recycled, synthetic fibers
The felt is made with recycled synthetic fiber. It is a little under a 1/2” thick, coated/crisp on one side and looser, more apparently tangled on the other. Small flecks of color show up throughout, but mostly it is gray. I’ve been referring to it as industrial felt carpet underlayment, or needle felt underlayment. This material came to me by way of Simparch, who had used it in past projects (see piece with Steve Rowell, http://www.simparch.org/tx-aux-in/, for the TX AUX IN) and was also familiar to me as a sound baffle working on their team in warehouse shop spaces.
I wanted to learn more about the interaction of sound with this material, and so installed it three ways in a reverberant space in Iowa City. I ran a series of tests: clapping, yelling, playing rhythmic spoken-word tracks by Moondog at it, to see what impact the friction-full material was having on the travel of sound waves. The difference was felt : )
6x40 foot, gray, needle felt underlayment wrapping around the corner and onto the floor of a white-walled gallery space.
After all of this, it made sense to try to use this felt as a sound baffle material in the Weinberg/Newton Installation. I thought of it as an experiment and offering for the talks and events that would be programmed by curator Kasia Houlihan and the ACLU in a show about democracy, (see All That Glows In the Dark of Democracy). On the most elemental and personal level, the acts of listening, speaking and being heard, struck me as crucial for a functional democracy. I thought of the canopy of baffles as an intimate space within the gallery, to engage a listener’s nuanced perception of the spoken word.
Special thanks to friends who were instrumental in learning about and sourcing this material: Simparch, Paul Somers, and Heather Parrish
And to Shannon Stratton for a persisting question, “WHY use industrially manufactured felt?” from a grad school critique in 2010.