Sven Anderson | Streets - Past Present and Future

Streets: Past, Present and Future is a responsive video and sound installation by artists Ciara O'Malley and Sven Anderson and individuals and community groups based in the North Inner City region of Dublin.

Sited at the Connolly Luas tram station (the Red Line terminus), Streets presents a multifaceted narrative comprised of stories focused on the North Inner City to a diverse audience of tourists, commuters, and passersby, as well as to the adjacent local community whose collective voice the artwork seeks to represent. The project ran from April 2009 until June 2010.

The artwork is comprised of two large-scale video projections and an immersive sound environment, both integrated into the tram station's unique, open architecture. The artwork's visual content combines photography, scanned paintings, videos, and writing contributed by the members of 27 participating community groups, while the sound environment is composed from field recordings that capture the urban sounds that permeate the station. Both the artwork's visual and aural components are generated in real-time from a software system that responds to the sound of traffic passing on the street adjacent to the station, linking the installation's output to the dynamics of its referent site.

The Streets launch event took place at the Connolly Station Luas stop on Wednesday, April 29, 2009. The launch included presentations by writer Peter Sheridan, artists Sven Anderson and Ciara O'Malley, and the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA)'s senior landscape architect, Tony Williams.

For more information on the design of this installation, please refer to the article Microsound in Public Space: Compositional Methods to Enhance Site-Specific Sound listed in my Publications section. This article provides a detailed discussion of how this artwork was designed as a response to the site of the station. Please also refer to the Streets Catalogue in the same section, which contains an introductory essay by writer Gemma Tipton as well as background information on the community projects and collaborations that initiated the project.

To hear the projects sonic output, please download this short sample (11m 16s), which represents two of the six channels of audio (a mixdown of all six channels of audio is too dense for stereo listening).

Streets began at Fire Station Artists' Studios and was completed in collaboration with the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA).

The photographs presented here were taken by Hugh McElveen of Exhibit A Studios in Dublin.