Opening soon for a five-month-long free exhibit, Tim Hawkinson's "Bosun's Bass" is the celebrated San Francisco native/Los Angeles resident artist's first major public artwork in the city. It is located next to the Exploratorium, on Pier 15.
Hawkinson's experiment with the physics of sound combines elements of transportation: a shipping container, bus bellows, and a bicycle with complex programming.
Invoking the eerie sounds of the city’s maritime past, "Bosun’s Bass" is a tide-activated sound work that re-interprets the bosun's pipe (or boatswain's call), a high pitched whistle used by mariners to give commands in conditions where the human voice cannot carry over the roar of the sea. Hawkinson explains:
I've used air to create sound in a number of previous sculptures, but this is the first time I have worked with air created through natural forces to animate an installation. I decided to model the piece after the bosun's call because I was interested in working with a sound making tradition that borders somewhere between artistic expression and regimented command. Upscaling the whistle gave it a lower pitch as well as a greater physical presence. Three octaves lower than the traditional whistle may not carry as far, but I think it's a little easier on your ears.
Hawkinson is known for his idiosyncratic and imaginative artworks that re-purpose everyday materials in inventive sculptural constructions, several using sound components. His "Überorgan" installation is a stadium-size, fully automated bagpipe, pieced together from bits of electrical hardware and several miles of inflated plastic sheeting. Hawkinson’s fascination with music and notation can also be seen in "Pentecost," a work in which the artist tuned cardboard tubes and assembled them in the shape of a giant tree.
In "Bosun's Bass," the shipping container, pitched vertically and installed over a hole in the deck of the pier, provides the lungs of the system. Tidal waters rise and fall in the container, compressing air and pushing it up into a giant bellows mounted above.
The bellows, reclaimed from the pleated section of an articulated Muni bus, provide a steady source of pressurized air, which moves through a hose to the bicycle frame and blows the bosun’s pipe. The airflow is controlled by a series of valves, levers, and other mechanisms that emulate a bosun’s hand and mouth motions to produce different sounds in the whistle.
Cued by patterns cut into the tread of the bike's rear wheel, the bass bosun's pipe plays 21 different traditional calls including "Attention," "Carry On," "Swab the Deck" and "Pipe Down.”
Marina McDougall, director of the Exploratorium’s Center for Art & Inquiry, says, "the charismatic appeal of the work, with its surprising parts and wonderfully convoluted logics, inspires us to wonder at the underlying physics involved in the production of sound in new ways.”
The Exploratorium is open every day in July and August (closed on Mondays during the rest of the year), from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with After Dark programs on Thursdays from 6 to 10 p.m. for adults only.