Created by artist Chris Kallmyer, Song Cycle is a kinetic sign, describing a world of music through ever-evolving poetry. The piece re-proposes Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall as a transit hub, pointing to the ways that music transports us as listeners. Part imagined, part remembered, and part observed, Song Cycle’s text is continually inscribed and reinscribed by a 256-character split-flap sign reminiscent of the arrival and departure boards found at airports and train stations in the 20th century.
Song Cycle utilizes code-driven randomization to produce a never-ending poem that is at turns joyful, mundane, social, and humorous – a complete product of chance. The text speculates on the special relationship between architecture and music by proposing new scenarios for music beyond the concert hall. In this way, the work functions as a work of speculative architecture by proposing alternative contexts and social functions for music in the world. Through an evolving text, Song Cycle asks audiences to delight in music as it passes us by. To bring the kind of attention found in the concert hall back into the world, where music is everywhere if you are present enough to hear it.
Created for the reopening of Walt Disney Concert Hall after a historic closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work was installed in October 2021 and has now received an extended run through June 2022.
