Artist and architect Christopher Janney, SM ‘78, is a multimedia multitasker. His current workload includes finishing a sound and light installation for a housing development in Leeds, England; designing a 10-story parking garage with colored glass corners in Fort Worth, TX; and collaborating on a performance project with musician Herbie Hancock.
Janney says that far from wearing him out or distracting him, such diversity fuels his creativity. “I believe pushing two seemingly disparate conditions together is what can create new possibilities,” he says. “My interest is in walking a path between architecture and music. I have learned to stay in uncomfortable places of unresolved conditions to wait for new possibilities to emerge.”
Janney courts those possibilities at his home in Lexington, MA, where his company, PhenomenArts, occupies greenhouses that have been converted into studio spaces for sculpture, design, and music. Through his significant body of work–much of which is chronicled in his 2007 book Architecture of the Air: The Sound and Light Environments of Christopher Janney–he has found ways to make those disciplines intersect. He is the artist behind Reach: New York, which lets commuters on the platforms of Manhattan’s 34th Street/Herald Square subway station elicit the sounds of rain forests or flutes by waving their hands in front of light sensors. He hooked Mikhail Baryshnikov up to a wireless biofeedback device that let him dance to the rhythm of his own heart, accompanied by live music, in HeartBeat:mb. And when rehearsals with Herbie Hancock’s band start later this year, he’ll be playing a keyboard and manning a bank of computers that use audio input from the entire band to vary the scale, shape, color, and pattern of images displayed on a screen. For each piece, a different, thematically related image will be associated with each instrument.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.