Firat Erdim – ATMOSPHERIC LISTENING STATION

Experience this work on picnic hill.

An aeolian harp is a musical instrument played by the movement of the air around us. When the wind blows across a string, vortices are shed alternately from one side to the other, causing the string to vibrate back and forth at right angles to the direction of the wind. The stereo aeolian harp of the Atmospheric Listening Station has one string split in two, each half spaced apart and connected to separate resonators (metal “beverage bins”) suspended off a flagpole with a wood framework. As with our stereoscopic vision, our stereo hearing is one way we perceive the depth of space around us and situate ourselves within it. The slight out-of-phase-ness of the two halves of the string is due to difference between how the air is moving across one length versus the other, producing a stereo sound with a thickness, a sense of the atmosphere as a body or medium but not a thing.

Firat Erdim’s drawings and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Spartanburg Art Museum (SC), the Museo dell'Alto e dell'Altrove di Metropoliz (Rome), the American Academy in Rome, The Windor (Madrid), and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen). He was the co-founder and director of Flash Atölye (2012-13), an experimental project space for art and architecture in Izmir, Turkey. His work has been supported by residencies at I-Park (CT), Vermont Studio Center, Babayan Culture House (Turkey), and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest (KY), as well as with a 2017 grant from the Center for Excellence in Arts and the Humanities at Iowa State University. Awards include the 2014 Founders Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, and the 2016 Santo Foundation Award for Individual Artists. He has a Bachelor of Architecture Degree from the Cooper Union (2001), and a Master of Architecture Degree from the University of Virginia (2007). Erdim is currently an Assistant Professor and the Daniel J. Huberty Faculty Fellow in the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University.