In the moving box full of CDs still to be archived, I came across a hand-burned disc labeled “Prison Symphony.” I was surprised to find out that it was, in fact, music I myself had written and forgotten. An unexpected gift from myself to myself.

My mind raced back to try and remember the circumstances behind this piece, and I found myself as a fifth year scholar at DePauw in the ‘97-’98 academic year. I’d finished up my degree, and diploma hung on the wall, was sticking around (at the university’s expense) to further the cause of Humanities by taking classes that were not in my major area. I had a hard time choosing (like magic, all prerequisites were waived, so I had the run of the catalog), but finally I managed to choose a few languages and two art classes; the ever-popular beginning ceramics and a one time seminar on installation art. Bolting things to walls and making people walk through them was an attractive prospect.

Installation Art as a discipline is about as specific as “putting things on other things,” so I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I got was this: the teacher had struck a deal with the city to rent out the recently-abandoned county jail, and we were going to use the jail as the installation, with each student getting a portion of the jail to work with. But before we set foot in the jail-cum-gallery we did research; we learned as much as we could about the history of the jail building, and of jails themselves, and theories of incarceration and punishment. De Sade, Aquinas, Bentham. I can trace my distrust of art film to this class.

Being a musician then, I had decided to incorporate music into the installation, and I stayed up late tinkering with what now to me is a primitive program. I sampled and resampled and mushed and stretched and came up with what, to me, was an expression of the oppressive, intrusive, unpleasant, impersonal experience of the theoretical prisoner. I was at the time fascinated by the idea of the Bentham’s panopticon, a type of prison meant to foster mental uncertainty through perpetual surveillance (surely no parallels in our camera society), and it was deeply woven into the work.

Finally the day of the jail lottery arrived, and we were the most eager bunch ever to go into an abandoned, barely cleaned, musty wreck of a prison. I fell in love with the storage room and managed to lay a claim to it while the art majors staked out space in the cell blocks.

Here I ran into two problems. The first was, that, despite my keen senses and warrior’s will, I was in an advanced art class with absolutely no technical skill. I devised magnificent plans, only to realize that there was no way I could ever hope to actuate it in the amount of time; I’ll say nothing of time or money, which were an issue (we had to buy/scavenge our own construction materials). The second was that the music I had written, once played in the room, was completely wrong; I’d have to start over. I burned it to a CD, put it in my collection and promptly forgot about it until my future self would find it in a distant October.

Faced with more than a little fear and dread, I went back to the beginning and and considered what I had to work with. I thought about freedom and the windowless stone storage room with chipping paint around me, and I realized that with one action I could both solve my problem and play to my strengths in a way that was true to the place. And then I removed the room.

The final installation, which I called Kairos (borderless), consisted of a tape piece which I had playing as a loop from two stereos nestled in the pipes above the room. Over the space of a month, Ani Difranco on the boombox, I emptied and cleaned the room and constructed a complicated light-lock three or four layers deep with black fabric and plastic. For the opening, I turned on the music and turned off the lights. Stepping through the door was stepping into a lightless space of indeterminate size with a rich harmonic drone coming from no specific location.

The public opening was sadly the same day as the closing, but for that day I was the warden of a prison not of cages and walls, but of their complete lack. I learned that one person’s prison is not another’s; some people went into the room, felt out a space on the floor and sat down for the remainder of the exhibit. One person payed a rather hefty sum for the CD of the drone, as he felt it calming. Then again, some other people stepped in and immediately fled. I got people to react and think, so I’d say my first and only installation was a qualified success.

Prison Symphony

• I. Panoptic Panygrations (10:15)
• II. Bentham Reverie (4:45)
• III. Perfect In Virtue (6:31)
• IV. I’ve Got A Panoption (9:23)

Kairos

• Kairos (borderless) (43:33)