Inside a black tent at the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival, you can hear jabbering.

The sound is somewhat muffled, but the talking heads seem to be screaming, talking over one another.

They are representative of how we think we are really listening to someone, but we have no idea what they are saying because we are trying to get our message across.

And, in turn, no one gets heard.

“We need to communicate better,” said Jimmy West, the artist who created the installation.

It’s called “Utterance.”

West, a sculptor, created 11 life-size heads, two made of resin and nine in bronze. Through the use of computer software in a studio, he recorded his voice screaming with the sound coming from the heads perched on a pole.

West describes it as a symbolic sculpture, which uses “illumination and volume control, about how we, as humans, need to quiet the noise around us and listen, really listen, to the messages that are being broadcast, and how we use our own voices to communicate.”

The piece is located in The Backyard, an outdoor area at Eighth and Penn avenues, Downtown.

It will be on display until June 11.

People can download a QRcode and record their answer to the question and upload it on an app: How can we communicate better?

Posts will be viewed to make sure people don’t use profanity or hate. The posts will be shown on a loop on a screen next to the installation throughout the 10-day festival.

JoAnne Klimovich Harrop | Tribune-Review

Artist Jimmy West of Blawnox pretends he is screaming at one of the talking heads in his sculpture, “Utterance,” on June 1 at The Backyard in Downtown Pittsburgh for the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival.

West was making final adjustments to the piece on June 1. He said tone is very important when trying to get a message across.

“It is how I deliver a word, how we perceive each other and how we receive each other,” he said. “Too many times there is all this noise and no one is really listening.”

“Think about what you experience every day; there is simply too much noise and not enough listening,” he said. “‘Utterance’ reminds us that in order to listen to one another, really listen, we must first quiet the noise that surrounds us. Only then can we truly hear and be heard.”

West’s piece represents why art matters, said Sarah Aziz, Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival director.

“It will be a safe place for discussion, and the piece is really about getting people talking,” Aziz said. “I hope it sparks some thoughtful conversation and active listening.”

Marc Fleming chief marketing officer and curator of Broadway productions for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, said West’s piece looks at communication through a common experience.

“Art pieces like this one that are interactive draw people in, and they see different angles of a topic,” Fleming said. “This piece will create open conversation.”

An inspiration for the piece came from a conversation West had with his 5-year-old granddaughter, Lola. She was listening to the talking heads and said, “Pops, why can’t they just talk?”

“We need to be better listeners,” West said. “Art has done what it was intended to do when art makes people think and remember.”

West, who grew up in Fox Chapel, has a studio in Blawnox, which he calls Studio Wild West. He created it from a 50-foot-wide by 30-foot-wide barn, which he had dismantled in Washington, Washington County and reassembled. He has been creating art for more than three decades. One of his most recognizable local pieces sits atop Mt. Washington — the larger-than-life bronze sculptures called “Point of View” depicts the monumental meeting of George Washington and Seneca leader Guyasuta in 1770. He installed that in 2006.

West is self-taught but credits his late uncle, Frank West, who was a developer, as one of his mentors.

He made the heads in “Utterance” abstract so that the focus is on the sound and not the faces. He talks about the piece on his website.

“The voices overlap like they are talking over one other,” West said. “This is exciting to me because I am always learning technology is becoming such a big part of art. We want people to be able to touch this and feel it and listen to it. The more you are tied to it, the more it will affect you. I want people to think and to pause and for them to not be a prisoner of their thoughts.”

“I am right, and you are wrong,” West said. “And I am not listening to what you have to say. Why can’t we just talk to each other and learn how can we communicate better? I hope this piece starts a dialog.”

So do the talking heads.

JoAnne Klimovich Harrop is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact JoAnne by email at jharrop@triblive.com or via Twitter .

Categories:
Downtown Pittsburgh | Fox Chapel Herald | Local | Art & Museums | Valley News Dispatch

The art collective KIRAC was embroiled in court battles over a film about the author’s sex life. Is the dispute a performance? A marketing stunt? Or a genuine cultural feud?

The music streaming world remains an insanely competitive place, one where it is constantly necessary to stand out. But how do companies do that? TIDAL is hoping to do so with their new Artists Home program, launched yesterday (May 31).

The idea behind the program, I found talking to Jesse Dorogusker, TIDAL CEO, and Agustina Sacerdote, TIDAL’s Head of Product, is to make it easier for artists to manage their online presence on TIDAL in one place.

As Dorogusker and Sacerdote explained, they understand an artists’ time is very previous. “To do so in a way that actually saves the artist’s time, saves the artist’s energy, because those are the two things that they need to create music. So again we just always want to default and gravitate towards helping the artist afford to make music and afford to live off of their art,” Sacerdote says of the program.

We spoke to them about TIDAL’s commitment to new artists, their excitement behind the Artists Home program and much more.

Steve Baltin: For me, I still get off more than anything on the sense of music discovery. It’s finding those new artists that you get excited about the same way you did when you were 15 years old. So Danielle Ponder had that.

Agustina Sacerdote: It’s funny that you mentioned this because this is something that I talk to my team a lot all the time. We spend so much time figuring out how to encourage and enable really exciting discovery like that, like you just talked about, within the app. I still think that live festivals are probably the most exciting way and the most effective way to get to that feeling. And so we’re thinking a lot about like how do we get you 24 hours after you went to a festival or went to a show, to have a similar experience or like leverage that experience in the app. And so obviously we have to know that you went to a show and stuff like that. But like that feeling, it happened to me with Tank And The Bangas recently. I went to a show and 24 hours later I had to spent $200 on records and stuff. Short answer is yes, we’re thinking about that for long.

Baltin: Let’s talk about Artists Home and obviously that ties in with the music discovery. What it is that you want people to be able to do with that?

Sacerdote: Artists Home, for us, is very important and very symbolic, obviously, of the direction that we want to go. It is effectively the first important and visible milestone towards this journey of, working directly with the artists in the spirit of helping them to make music. And if you look at it today, and if you look at Artists Home, in its initial stages , it’ll enable artists to manage their presence on TIDAL. And instead of getting lost in the shuffle between the distributors or their managers and us we try to make sure that their content is accurate and that their profile image supports their latest release, we’re now automating a lot of that. But most importantly, I think this provides a home. We were very intentional with the name where an artist can effectively manage and explore and learn about different ways to grow their business. And so we’re very really focused on the economic empowerment side of that, on the income side of that. And this is why also we’re focused a lot on the fan side. Because we know, and you probably know better than I do, that, streaming isn’t necessarily the best way for the vast majority of artists to make money. But having an active engaged fan base is. So, for us, it’s almost like we’re looking at the artists and we’re building tools and experiences directly, to solve their needs. But the fan side is the huge side of the equation as well. And, I think playing on both sides of the same coin is why we’re all here and why we think we can do something really meaningful in that regard.

Sage Bava: I’m an emerging artist. I’m releasing some music soon, and I am really intrigued to hear more about title and your recommendations for artists that are just putting music out now and how it differentiates from other streaming platforms.

Jesse Dorogusker: I can take that. Thrilled to have you on the call and congratulations. TIDAL has always been artist focused, artists first. It’s probably our biggest differentiator among the other streaming services. And the way Jay-Z and his co-founders started it in 2015 was very focused on artists. And the tools they had to do that was in their language, focusing on audio quality, really trying to present music in the way that artists intended it, and not diminishing it with compression and dismissing that as something that was unimportant or that not everyone could hear. And amazing editorial work focusing on artist, artist journeys, artist stories, celebrating the history and the present and the future of musicianship and contribution to a dialogue in a catalog of music. So we carry all that forward and now are turning that into tech enabled direct relationships with artists with Artist Home. So in releasing new music, first presenting it in the best audio quality possible is a great idea. I know it’s not what all people need in all circumstances. If you’re on a mobile phone and a tight data plan, listening to an MP3 is okay. But not giving artists and fans and opportunity to listen to CD quality or better, I think that’s a mistake. And I’m really proud that we’ve always supported that. So that’s number one. We’ve refocused our, marketing and artist marketing efforts in a new program called Rising, which has had many journeys through TIDAL’s history, but we re-launched it as a way to just directly support rising artists. So we launched with a showcase of 20 artists who are focusing on, we’ll extend that to a couple hundred throughout the year where we’re providing education and spotlighting artists. We just did a showcase in Nashville around the Music Biz Conference with some rising artists. And, we did similar in Atlanta last fall. And we’re able to do simple things like put together a concert, buy a few billboards, spotlight the material on TIDAL, and help artists tell their own stories in their own way, and just get access to audiences and some tools that they’ve never had before. So Rising is a really great way for us to focus, not just supporting artists directly, but really our marketing efforts. TIDAL’s marketing has been an array of brand and superstars and concert tour launches and live streams. And now we’re focusing it a lot more on the artist’s journey and making sure that our dollars and our voice and our editorializing and our play listing is focusing on rising artists especially.

Baltin: What are the criteria you’re using in selecting TIDAL Rising artists?

Dorogusker: We’ve made sure that all of our showcases have been a diversity of music styles and genres, a diversity of ages. Geographically we’re trying to get all over the U.S. and do some of these spotlights globally as well. Rising artistry isn’t one thing. We do have strong credibility, history, and amazing editorial team in hip hop. I don’t think we’ll ever stray too far from that expertise and strength. But the Rising artist journey has a lot of common threads of discovery and struggle, and lack of access to data and anonymous fans and gate kept services and exclusion from the industry. And no access to capital, bad financial services, All of these things are consistent and bust through all of the genres and the choices. We can send you a list of the people that were in our Nashville Showcase and then our Atlanta Georgia Showcase, just to give you a flavor of how we’ve brought these stories to life. But really they’re just in the artist’s voices themselves, and we’re not trying to chart a narrow path through what a TIDAL artist is. Just what a Rising artist is.

Baltin: The one thing that we have found in interviews we’ve been doing this year, with everyone from Herbie Hancock to Samara Joy, is the return to organics and the fact that people really want a human connection. And that’s one of the things that really interests me because I think that’s where streaming for a long time failed is not being able to do that. How can you bring that human component in?

Dorogusker: It’s such a good observation. And we do see the same diversity and a lot of people with conflicting feelings about social media. I think the only focus for us that’s going to work and scale is giving artists agency and access to engage with what’s around them, however makes sense to them and let them tell stories. So that means de-anonymizing their fan base, that means revealing data to them in a way that they can take action on it. That means giving them tools to engage with social media however they want. A lot of fans would say they just want to be behind to velvet rope and meet their favorite artist. That might not be what the artist wants. We’re not just going to turn over the database and let people email, text message and DM their favorite artist. That’s not safe or a smart way to do it. But all of these tools, analysis, databases, loans, publishing rights, these are all just so elusive and we need to put it back in the hands of artists so they can decide what their journey is going to be like. And right now they have a lot of people deciding on their behalf and it’s a big mess.

Sacerdote: I also think, just to add to Jesse’s point and a little bit more on the ground, the decisions that we make from a product perspective is, there’s obviously all the tools to better manage social media, to put more content on all the platforms. Every single day we talk to companies that are creating a better way to email fans and things like that. It is very important to us that we improve, not just to Jesse’s point, visibility and ownership and control and agency and access to all of these things. But to do so in a way that actually saves the artist’s time, saves the artist’s energy, because those are the two things that they need to create music. So again we just always want to default and gravitate towards helping the artist afford to make music and afford to live off of their art. And us putting more tools in front of them isn’t necessarily the solution. And so we’re spending a lot of time talking and directly building with artists. We have already artists that are enrolled in Artist Home and using it today because we just want to make sure that it’s not another platform that they need to log onto and manage in the 15 minutes of admin time that they have during the day because they’re busy working at a coffee shop and then trying to book some gigs at night.