'Stop, Look, Listen' At Spencer Museum

To listen to the audio tours online and/or download and synch the tours to your own player, please visit: www.spencerart.ku.edu

This project is co-sponsored by the KU School of Fine Arts, Department of Art, and KU Parking & Transit.

The outside signage consists of fabricated yellow metal signs with iconographic black images inspired by artworks existing in the Spencer collection. The signs, placed in the parking lot behind the museum, seem familiar yet provide an opportunity for unexpected experiences for visitors.

The inside component is a self-guided audio tour of certain paintings and art objects, identified as part of the audio tour by a symbol or iconographic sign at their site. Participating patrons can either visit the Spencer website and synch the tour's MP3 files to their own iPod-type listening device, or borrow a player from the museum when they visit (a limited number are available). The tour eschews the traditional, historical information found in many such endeavors, instead offering mischievous, insightful, or ambiguous comments, unanticipated words and sounds, contributed by a variety of voices.

By creating a playful way-finding system both inside and out, and providing an unpredictable audio tour, the artists intend to create a system for people to move through a space that feels unique. Chance encounters with familiar signs, symbols and sounds will provide viewers with an enhanced museum experience. Ideally, viewers will be intrigued by the signs in the parking lot, drawn into the museum out of curiosity, and engaged by the visual and auditory experiences that are available to them inside.

In addition to their collaboration on Stop Look Listen for the Spencer, Maria Velasco and Janet Davidson-Hues have worked together on other projects over the past 5 years. Initially they performed together with women's performance art group, a.k.a. They also worked together on an Internet 2 project, titled Disrupting Pharaoh's Dream: Unmasking the Mother, which linked KU and NYU in real time, both locations broadcasting simultaneously and interacting with each other. In September of 2005, they participated in an International Installation Festival, Vogelfrei 6, in Darmstadt, Germany where they installed their Step-by-Step Ascension to Paradise in the garden of a private residence—a work comprising banners of contemporary imagery that reinterpreted the Biblical story of Adam and Eve's temptation and fall from grace. -- www.spencerart.ku.edu