Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles) is a technical cover-song to artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s City Links series, adapted for a high-speed interconnected world of streaming, liveness, and hybridity. This project, inspired by early iterations of City Links, brings together live hi-fidelity audio from multiple sites into a new situation. Here, the sites happen to be multiple water channels amidst constructed industrial infrastructure—the Los Angeles, Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers. 

The sounds from remote spots along these bodies of water coalesce at the separate, third site of Human Resources in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Using two portable A/V stations consisting of high-speed mobile wifi hotspots, solar paneled power–banks, condenser mics linked to mobile camera phones, and audio software, the resonant concrete architecture at HR becomes a hub and amplifier for ongoing signal receipt—a live mix for place, perception, and waters to recombine in presence and present-time. The audio mix from the third site, in turn, is relayed back out to broadcast via internet radio for global listening.

Artists and musicians from each location have been invited to “join” the audio stream throughout the installation as follows:

October 18, 2022: Patrick Shiroishi (performing near the LA River site)

October 19, 2022: Machine Listener (performing near the Pittsburgh site)

Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles) is presented at Human Resources as part of Everything in Air, a series of public programs over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure.

This project was supported in part by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Further Fund, and a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Artist Project Grant.